Defensively Speaking: Scared Money

Ohio State’s defensive gameplan was extremely conservative. They rarely blitzed, and the ultimate objective was clearly to prevent big gains and force Michigan to drive the ball all the way down the field. Truthfully the defense played well overall. However, Michigan was able to find just enough success to come away with a victory on Saturday.

This article is going to be relatively short. I first want to explain where Michigan found success in the passing game. After that, I want to break down Blake Corum’s touchdown run. Let’s dive right in.

Overall, Ohio State’s pass defense was very good. We saw more Cover 4 from Ohio State than we had all season which, again, was likely a result of Knowles’ plan to prevent big plays. However, Michigan eventually began to take advantage of this by repeatedly finding their tight ends in the weak hook-curl zone (the hook-curl zone to the boundary):

Another example of this can be seen below:

Now let’s move on and look at Blake Corum’s touchdown run. It’s unfortunate because Ohio State truly stifled Michigan’s run game outside of this one play. I assume everyone is blaming Steele Chambers for allowing this run to happen because it appeared as if he vacated the backside A-gap. However, Chambers actually is not to blame, and I’ll explain why.

Michigan was running B-gap Iso (below):

Note how the “sniffer” tight end in the backfield is inserting through the B-gap to climb up to the second level. When the tight end inserts, it creates two new gaps, and there needs to be someone fitting both of those gaps (i.e., on both sides of the tight end), which is why Chambers vacated his pre-snap gap (he was fitting off the inside shoulder of the tight end).

Once Chambers vacates his pre-snap gap (as he was supposed to), it becomes Sonny Styles’ responsibility to come up and fill that gap instead. As you can see in the above clips, Styles did exactly that, but he unfortunately missed the tackle.

I have included a diagram of the run fits below to try providing a better visual:

Despite a great defensive effort, the Buckeyes came up just short on Saturday. While it would have been nice for the Silver Bullets to leave the offense with a little more time at the end of the game, they still left the offense with a legitimate chance to win. Regardless of the final score, the defense under Jim Knowles is still on the right track moving forward beyond this season.