Sizing up Big 12 competition
Many coaches don’t come into Big 12 Media Days looking to reveal much about their teams but there are often nuggets which come out. Some coaches are happy to reveal details about their team in order to generate conversation about their program, others have more than enough conversation already going and would rather play things close to the vest.
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There have been a few nuggets released though as Day 1’s coaches revealed a number of insights into how their team will approach this season and how the Big 12 will shape up.
Kansas State sticks with the flyover defense
Chris Klieman revealed K-State went into 2021 unsure of whether they’d play four-down or three-down defense.
Last year when we went into fall camp we were still unsure if we were going to wholesale three-down or still play four-down.
And so we practiced both of them because we’d recruited mostly to four-down. So we had them both working all through fall camp. And then it was kind of our players that said they felt more comfortable with the three-down. And that’s how we started this game, the game against Stanford in here, and played really fast, and the kids just fell in love with it.
-Chris Klieman at the 2022 Big 12 Media Days
The three-down “flyover” defense K-State employed makes them an interesting squad for the 2022 season, particularly with the return of nose tackle Eli Huggins and EDGE Felix Anudike-Uzomah. With many key pieces returning and another year to work with the scheme, K-State has some major upside potential on defense heading into the new season.
But this will be our first full season with not wavering to think, are we going to go to a four-down, but we’re staying with a three-down, so it gave us the opportunity in the off-season to do some professional development with our staff, to go to different places that are running some three-down; that we were pretty vanilla, we thought, last year with our three-down, and we probably need to be a little bit more aggressive and add a few more wrinkles.
-Chris Klieman at the 2022 Big 12 Media Days
The nature of the scheme is such that it favors utilizing a lot of disguise and movement. As Tyler Legacy head coach Joe Willis once described emergent three-down, anti-spread defense to me years ago, it’s more of an 8-3 defense than a traditional 3-4 style. You have eight guys standing up who can move all over the place and present different leverages and pressures for the offense to think about.
Adding more versatility to their scheme can only help the Wildcats make a stab at title contention.
West Virginia plans to get aggressive on defense
If you were worried about Neal Brown’s losses on defense through the transfer portal, he is not.
We think this defensive unit has the opportunity to be the best that we’ve fielded so far. We’re never going to lose what makes West Virginia special, and that’s toughness. We really try to mirror the mindset of our state, and West Virginia, it’s a blue-collar group that goes to work, and are really proud of their heritage.
-Neal Brown at the 2022 Big 12 Media Days
It’s a very new cast of characters, including Mike linebacker Lee Kpogba whom Brown expects to be one of the best linebackers in the league. In particular, the Mountaineers took a ton of transfers in the secondary and filled it out with cornerbacks and cornerback-to-safety converts from lower levels of football.
When we looked at what we had returning in our secondary, we liked the youth that we had. We’ve got some guys that can really run that are in their first or second year within our program.The one thing that we were intentional about trying to improve defensively is we’ve been a primary zone coverage team over the last two years, and we’ve had success. It’s been successful for us. But we haven’t been able to create as much havoc up front because when you play zone coverage, you only can rush four, five guys at one time. We wanted to get faster, more athletic in the back end so we could play more coverage so we could rush six and maybe even seven sometimes.
-Neal Brown at the 2022 Big 12 Media Days
He singled out Wesley McCormick, a multi-year starter at James Madison who may start at cornerback opposite Charles Woods, and North Dakota State transfer Jasir Cox who can play either outside linebacker position.
The last time West Virginia was able to bring zero blitzes (bringing six or seven pass-rushers means zero deep safeties) was 2016 when they went 10-3 thanks to the infusion of several JUCO transfers in the secondary.
This would be an interesting approach for the Mountaineers to take in 2022 given their preference for sitting back in two-high coverages up till now under Brown. It could definitely work, their quality at cornerback is up since adding some FCS stars, but it’s obviously a risky venture.
Dave Aranda foresees spread tactics back at the forefront
Dave Aranda’s becoming a great quote on evolving tactics around the league. Last year he gave a soliloquy on how running wide zone with tight ends would be the future of the league to combat modern defensive tactics which are all designed to handle inside zone spread systems.
One year later his running back ran for over 1,500 yards and his team won the Big 12, and he’s chiming in on how things are changing again.
The concern about teams sitting with their safeties eight yards deep while the D-line and linebackers stunt and move around was very much an Oklahoma issue. Alex Grinch was the Chief Poobah of this strategy. However, there’s a lot of fresh HUNH spread coaches back into the league and Aranda foresees defenses having to maintain their strategies for dealing with it amidst their solutions to his own wide zone system.
This could be an advantage for Baylor if their opponents aren’t able to prepare exclusively for the Baylor/Iowa State style in pursuit of a Big 12 Championship.
