Defensively Speaking: Buckeyes Evolving Through Aggression

Against Purdue, the Buckeye defense continued their streak of strong performances this season. Jim Knowles was fairly aggressive throughout the game and continued his trend of mixing things up on the back end. Let’s take a deeper look.

As always, Knowles used Cover 1 Rat coverage a fair amount throughout the game:

Note how Tommy Eichenberg is in man coverage on the running back, Steele Chambers is in the low hole, Josh Proctor is the deep safety, and everyone else is in man coverage.

Furthermore, for the second straight week, Knowles made use of Cover 1 Robber coverage (below):

In Cover 1 Robber, the defense will start in a 2-high look before one of the safeties rotates down to the middle of the field to read the quarterback’s eyes. In this case, it was the boundary safety (Lathan Ransom). With neither safety having a man coverage responsibility in this call, one of the linebackers will be responsible for either a tight end or slot receiver in man coverage. On this play, it was Steele Chambers who was in man coverage on the tight end in the slot to the boundary (bottom of the screen).

Knowles also ran Tampa-2 from a 3-high safety look a few times throughout the day. When running Tampa-2 from 3-high, the middle safety will become the pole runner in the high hole:

In addition to Tampa-2, we saw regular Cover 2 from Ohio State for the second straight week. Notice how Ohio State starts from their 3-high look, but the middle safety drops down to the hook-curl zone to the field rather than staying in the high hole:

Additionally, Ohio State continued their trend of running more quarters coverage concepts. Below, Ohio State runs cone coverage to the single receiver side and what appears to be stump coverage (another quarters concept) to the three-receiver side:

Knowles probably also made more pressure calls on Saturday than he has in any of his previous games as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator. Naturally, he called for his favorite blitz quite a bit, which is an A-gap pressure from the linebacker to the Nose Tackle’s side with the Nose Tackle stunting to the opposite A-gap and Cover 1 behind the pressure. See an example in the following clip and diagram of how the linebacker’s gap responsibilities change as a result of the blitz call – it looks like Cody Simon should be the backside A-gap defender based on his pre-snap alignment, but he ultimately becomes the play-side B-gap defender, and he and Jack Sawyer stop the ball-carrier for a short gain.

Additionally, Knowles also called for the new A-gap pressure he installed this season, which sends the linebacker to the 3-tech’s side through the A-gap. The linebacker will read the center to determine which A-gap to insert.

Lastly, Knowles called for a pressure with the Nickel as the extra rusher quite a bit throughout the day. Watch it work the perfection below against Purdue’s GY Counter play:

Outside of a few blunders, Ohio State defended the run well throughout the afternoon. Below, Purdue runs Power, but both Mike Hall and Tyleik Williams fight over the down blocks which leads to a TFL:

And below, Purdue runs Split Zone, but Ohio State remains gap sound. Jordan Hancock, in particular, did a great job coming up and filling the B-gap:

While I do not believe Purdue’s offense ever posed any serious threat to Ohio State, I still think Ohio State’s defense deserves some credit for how well they played. We are also continuing to see Knowles’ scheme evolve, so the players should also get credit for how well they’ve been able to adjust to the added variety.