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Dont kill me for this, but....


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I have never played a day of organized football. So those of you who have can blow up my whole idea....be easy on me.

 

The Cornhuskers' offense is more than likely going to put a lot of stress on the defense.  

The defense has been pointed in the "we are going to go for the ball".

Which is also going to tire out the defense.

 

Would it not be prudent to have a (think hockey) line of defense that goes out there for a series, and then another for the next series?

 

My line of thinking is the first line is if the Offense is going to run up and down the field, that's going to give a lot of extra reps to the defense to defend.

 

In a year that is obviously going be growing pains on defense but the players are all going to be a little closer together in what they are capable of doing within the scheme.  

 

After a year of getting the second line out there on a consistent basis should give them a much deeper depth in the years to come of you continue pushing it as a scheme.

 

The goal would be to have an offense that can score 35 or more or game which Scott Frost has demonstrated that his offense does, and have two squads that rotate based on how much time they've been given to rest between their last series.

 

Pretending that we can go without injuries, is there a specific reason why defense can not innovate this into a scheme?

 

Be gentle.

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Your name makes sense because you must be living in a cave if you haven't heard this concern before :D.  The one thing I don't understand is how going for the ball will tire out the defense.  They are trying to shorten the drive by creating turnovers instead of the long drives allowed by the "bend but don't break" philosophy.  

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While I don't anticipate "wholesale line changes" every possession, I do expect the coaches wanting to recruit and develop enough talent on D in order to rotate players and keep them fresh.  I think Coach Chinander said he wants 15-16 scholarship CB's.  He wouldn't want that many if he wasn't planning on rotating those guys.  The only bad part is that the current depth isn't nowhere near where the coaching staff wants it to be.

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5 minutes ago, STL Husker said:

Your name makes sense because you must be living in a cave if you haven't heard this concern before :D.  The one thing I don't understand is how going for the ball will tire out the defense.  They are trying to shorten the drive by creating turnovers instead of the long drives allowed by the "bend but don't break" philosophy.  

Haha, yeah...well I do live on and island in the Caribbean...so I dont get to get on the discussion boards as much anymore.

1 minute ago, ColoradoHusk said:

While I don't anticipate "wholesale line changes" every possession, I do expect the coaches wanting to recruit and develop enough talent on D in order to rotate players and keep them fresh.  I think Coach Chinander said he wants 15-16 scholarship CB's.  He wouldn't want that many if he wasn't planning on rotating those guys.  The only bad part is that the current depth isn't nowhere near where the coaching staff wants it to be.

Brings up a different subject that I dont understand...for another day I suppose 

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2 hours ago, huskerinacaveman said:

Pretending that we can go without injuries, is there a specific reason why defense can not innovate this into a scheme?

 

Hockey is essentially basketball on ice. Why don't you see every team in that sport have line changes? Because the referee blows his whistle all of the time. Hockey had to adopt that method not only because of the extreme endurance necessary, but because there are so few stoppages. They'd much rather have the capacity to keep their best players out there longer, like other sports.

 

Football is the complete opposite of hockey, even though they are both categorized as ball and net sports. Hockey is an endurance game with few stoppages, football is played in 5 second bursts. Even though a football game takes about 3 hours on TV, the actual total playing time is roughly 11 minutes, which is similar to baseball. There is a lot of downtime in football, and a lot of opportunities to substitute.

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I think it just depends how much depth you have. Teams like Alabama, Ohio State or Georgia may be able to do that. Or teams like Nebraska or Florida State in the 90s. Maybe not an entire different 11 on defense, but they have the talent and depth to substitute without the quality of the defense dropping dramatically.

 

I don't know if Nebraska has the depth across the board to do that this fall. I think they may be able to rotate guys in the front seven some. That would help keep them fresh. I don't know if they have enough guys in the secondary to do it though. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how many games it will take for Nebraska just to field a solid starting 4-5 defensive backs. 

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When you look at the chip Kelley coaching tree these guys typically field offenses that score quickly, and aggressive defenses that sometimes give up big points. They dig deep into their bench to keep guys fresh but even then by the end of the game you still have a gassed defense. I don't want to call it a high risk, high reward, style of play but it's definitely pushing that line and heavily strains the opposing team as it tries to keep up and in so doing makes mistakes all the more critical.

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13 minutes ago, Hans Gruber said:

Maybe not an entire different 11 on defense, but they have the talent and depth to substitute without the quality of the defense dropping dramatically.

 

Here's an example. (And I'm going from memory here, so some of the starters I name may have been backups and there may be guys I'm forgetting).

 

Using the 1997 Nebraska defense, they usually ran a 4-3. Grant Wistrom, Jason Peter and Jason Wiltz started on the D-line along with either Mike Rucker or Chad Kelsay (I don't remember which of those two started). Steve Warren was a backup DT along with either Rucker or Kelsay at DE. That gave Nebraska a good six-man rotation on the defensive line.

 

I believe the three starting linebackers were Jay Foreman, Octavious McFarlin and Tony Ortiz. I think Brian Shaw, Carlos Polk and Eric Johnson were the backups. So they may have substituted a little f=more freely at linebacker.

 

I'm pretty sure the starting secondary was Ralph Brown, Eric Warfield, Mike Brown and Erwin Swinney. I think Joe Walker and Clint Finley were the top backups.

 

That gave Nebraska a starting 11 and then seven backups. It wasn't a full 22 deep they freely substituted, but playing 18 guys still kept guys relatively fresh though.

 

Like I said in the first post though, you need a lot of talented dudes to do that without much drop off.

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The comparison to hockey line changes doesn't really work for football. A typical hockey team will have 4 lines of 3 offensive players and 2 defensemen. Often the O and D will change independently of each other. So they're rolling with about 8 defensemen and changing 2 of them about every 45 seconds. But in hockey those guys are balls to the wall their whole shift. Football has Huddles, play stoppages, rest periods while the offense is on the field yada yada yada. It's two completely different animals as far as trying to keep fresh legs on the field or ice. But yeah, if the offense is racing up and down the field causing the defense to not get to rest then it would be good to have more defensive players substituting more often. But there are 11 defenders in football and you also want your best players on the field. Recently we haven't had 4 or 5 guys that could take care of their position let alone 11 or 22. That's why depth of roster was brought up.

 

I won't get into coaching or scheme and how that's hampered our players. So it's not all on the players but that should be obvious.

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31 minutes ago, Comfortably Numb said:

But yeah, if the offense is racing up and down the field causing the defense to not get to rest then it would be good to have more defensive players substituting more often.

 

The problem when facing an offense like Frost's is the defense doesn't control the substitutions. If the offense substitutes, the defense gets to, but if the offense is versatile enough that they don't need to then the defense runs the risk of not getting it done before the snap. Knowing this, our defense will rotate heavily when possible, but guys have to be physically ready to stay on the field if the opponent's  tempo dictates as such.

 

 

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4 hours ago, brophog said:

 

The problem when facing an offense like Frost's is the defense doesn't control the substitutions. If the offense substitutes, the defense gets to, but if the offense is versatile enough that they don't need to then the defense runs the risk of not getting it done before the snap. Knowing this, our defense will rotate heavily when possible, but guys have to be physically ready to stay on the field if the opponent's  tempo dictates as such.

 

 

 

firm+grasp+of+obvious.gif

 

I thought the OP was inquiring how to keep our defense fresh not how our offense is going to stress the opponents D. :dunno

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If anyone caught the Chinander interview on Sharp and Benning (from another recent post here), he told the story about how Frost ordered him to take out all of his guys and put backups in during the third quarter of a game (or more than one game?).  So, while it's not exactly like the OP suggested, it will happen, in that there will be plenty of times when the 2+ strings will be getting a lot of opportunities.  It not only builds that depth, but it lets the main contributors rest and stay reasonably fresh for the season.

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