homerHAWKeye777
Well-Known Member
Yikes...that last part was kind of condescending, don't you think Homer? Sure it was a blanket statement regarding our "soft" D, but we are routinely in situations where we are giving opposing WR's large cushions. The entire basis behind the bend but don't break philosophy is keeping things in front of you, so our corners are usually in extremely soft coverage, which I think is what the poster was referring to. I don't think it takes a higher being or hours upon hours of poring over the coaches tape to come to that conclusion.
Playing schemes we can pull off given our personnel? I think you just described about every D-1A team out there. There isn't enough job security out there as a coach to run schemes that you know your players can't or aren't good at executing.
/sorry...now back to your regularly scheduled recruiting talk
hawkfan2679 -
Iowa simply doesn't put our young/inexperienced CBs in positions where they'll get burned for the big play. Iowa would much rather make sure that the CB relies on technique and good tackling and just give up what is in front of them.
However, when the guy demonstrates clear ability and can play CONSISTENTLY within our scheme ... then all of a sudden, we allow the guy to tighten up his coverage. That is EXACTLY how we used Spievey. As a result, apart from the Indiana game in '09, very few teams dared to throw the ball in Spievey's general direction. And, as I recall, I believe that Greenwood was injured and couldn't really play in that game ... thus, that injury made us a little bit more exploitable because the CB's help wasn't guaranteed to be quite as reliable.
Similarly, Fletcher proved to be a pretty effective "lock-down" CB through much of his SR year. He played really physical ball and won most of the battles when he was playing in press coverage.
If you go back and watch what Iowa did those years, we were a bit more experienced at CB then and we used it to implement press coverage more when we wanted to.
Of course, it's true that we still played most of the time in our base set ... where our guys are in zone coverage. However, even then, the windows of the zone get closed down VERY quickly ... and the windows were pretty narrow back then. As a result, we were gaining A TON of picks! That's the benefit of the philosophy ... it often equates to A TON of picks for the D.