Northwestern Week Pressers
- Thread starter Mavric
- Start date
Undone
All-American
Really glad to hear him verbalize this.
With Bo he would say verbatim, "Oh, I know how to fix this," referring to constantly getting blown out by the other team just running power at us. I always felt like his main roadblock to actually fixing it was his own stubbornness; it was always the players not executing as opposed to drawing up better, simpler schemes to stop the run.
If we're going to stick with a 3-4 then our lineman need to be stout. Our linebackers need to be more physical (outside of Barry's play), and our safeties need to be able to wrap up. And we have to play aggressively.
BigRedBuster
International Man of Mystery
There's not a lot of difference between what Frost and Pelini said. The biggest difference is Frost is alluding to the current players not having the ability to execute.
Undone
All-American
I should have given more context.
Pelini's defenses were awesome against the Big 12 spread teams. He occasionally matched up well against the more traditional offenses of the B1G in big games (Michigan State in 2011, Michigan a couple times), but more often than not was clobbered in the run game in big games after we got into the B1G.
I don't usually put too much stock one way or the other into what coaches say in pressers; I look for the results on the field and then determine what they're doing/no doing. But my point was that Frost recognizes that his defense isn't currently made up of the right stuff to play good defense against the power teams in this conference. "Made up of the right stuff" could encompass many things, but contrast that with Pelini who constantly insinuated that it was players not doing their job that would get us blown out.
Asking rhetorically (as Frost is five games into a long career here) at what point does a coach not retool things when what you have doesn't work? Frost realizes what he has now doesn't work against power teams. That realization seems significant.
