I was thinking of our great defenses in the late 90s and was wondering what really happened to it. I've heard that JLD never changed signals- EVER. And over the course of 20 yrs people caught on. Is this true? I know we had great players but JLD was successful before MSU, so I was just wondering why his defense fell off the map.</p>
Joe Lee Dunn question..
- Thread starter Hector.sixpack
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his defense 90% of the time and for that matter just about any short well executed pass pattern. As long as Joe Lee had extremely good players in the secondary that could hold that passing approach down to minimum damage then he could focus on stuffing the run which usually led to great success for his defenses. You alluded to it but Joe Lee was pretty stubborn and didn't adjust his approach much based on the talent at hand which I think is what great coaches do.
but as the late 90s came along, he had two outstanding lock-down corners in Bean and Smoot. That meant he could get away, for the most part, with manning up on outside receivers and running elaborate blitzes up the middle (which stopped the run and rushed the qb). But just like coach66 said, he never really changed the schemes, his patterns, or signals up, and teams were able to pick up on it and know what to run and when to run it (2001-2002). Also, he lost both his big corners and had to result in putting completely inexperienced guys in those positions who couldn't handle man defense and being isolated on the outside.
His defense always relied on the fact that the QB couldn't find the receiver and get him the ball in time to avoid the sack. Which worked fine before the college football passing game got a lot more sophisticated and QBs started getting a lot more accurate. When they did, they started shredding his defenses.
His downfall was also the same as for Jackie. We got a bad crop of Jucosto begin the 2001 season that just did not pan out and it just went down hill from there. The Arizona Western experiment was a disaster. You are not going to have two corners on the same team like Bean and Smoot every year. We only had them for one which was our best defense.</p>
what patdog said.Even with 2 shutdown corners, against the modern offense, you are going to end up with Josh Morgan one on oneagainst Jabar Gaffney. And those Dog safties were great until they had to play man to man defense.
patdog said:
I want to say his junior year he hit one of those for about an 80 yard score. That was one of the big problems with the Joe Lee defense. No one was more than 7 yards off the ball, so if you did hit a quick slot and that receiver found the seam, there was no one back to stop him.
Even in the years JLD had success at Ole Miss, he had guys like Johnny Dixon and Alundis Brice in the secondary. You really do have to have great players in the secondary to make his defense work, and as others have suggested, it may be out-dated now.
Having great cover corners and safeties were a plus but not the foundation of JLDs D. The Dline was the core to the years when his scheme succeeded at any school. The zone blitzes with the safeties (dog) were icing on the cake. He needed athletic lineman (Conner stephens) that could drop into coverage in the short middle of the field to cover the slot and hot routes while the LBs and corners/safeties blitzed. The reason his defense blew up was no push up the middle at the LOS. Any qb can pick apart one on one coverage with no pressure up the middle. Chaos was the goal but it only worked with pressure up front.
Just look at the byu 99 game where we often dropped our lineman and had our LBs with their hand on the ground. Or the FLA 2000 game. Willie Blade was unblockable that day giving us the ability to mix up our coverage on the outside. Of course auburn the next week just played into our strengths that year which was Dline. Tubseville was determined to run with Rudy and stubbornly wouldn't go away from it. Hence they didn't gain a first down in the entire first half.
But to say something like the post pattern killed us is silly.
Just look at the byu 99 game where we often dropped our lineman and had our LBs with their hand on the ground. Or the FLA 2000 game. Willie Blade was unblockable that day giving us the ability to mix up our coverage on the outside. Of course auburn the next week just played into our strengths that year which was Dline. Tubseville was determined to run with Rudy and stubbornly wouldn't go away from it. Hence they didn't gain a first down in the entire first half.
But to say something like the post pattern killed us is silly.
He came back down to the same realm of knowledge that other coaches live in?
http://mississippistate.scout.com/2/13825.html
RebelBruiser said:
JLD was gone by Eli's senior year, replaced by Ron Cooper and his patented ten-men-on-the-field defense. (Why only ten men? Because Odell Bradley might as well have been sitting in the stands for the good he did.)
I do recall him hitting Collins in 2002 on the play you're referring to. I remember it not for the play, but for the guy standing behind me in the metal bleacher north endzone who started screaming "JOE LEE RUBBED HIS BELLY!! JOE LEE RUBBED HIS BELLY!! THEY'RE GOING TO THROW A TOUCHDOWN!!!". And he was right.
Has anyone checked his wikipedia page?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lee_Dunn
Got a big laugh out of the first paragraph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lee_Dunn
Got a big laugh out of the first paragraph.
to handle Joe Lee Dunn's D. That actually played to Dunn's strength, because it gave more options to blitz with. He even said something to this effect in an interview one time, which I thought was kind of odd. Spreading people out limited where he could blitz from, and allowed good qb's to pick it apart with hot routes. Even with two lock down corners, you still would have to worry about somebody, usually a linebacker or safety, going man to man on one of the slots.
It was 3rd and short and we were still in the game, I recall. I didn't see Joe Lee, but I saw the LBs move like they were going to blitz. It was then I got the sinking feeling that Eli would get a quick pass off for at the very least a first down, probably more given what our defense was about to do.