Defensively Speaking: Akron

Aside from some poor tackling at times, Ohio State’s defensive performance in the 2024 season opener against Akron was phenomenal. While much of this was purely due to the talent gap between Ohio State’s defensive line and Akron’s offensive line, I do think Jim Knowles called a good game and showed some new wrinkles that we did not see last season. Let’s take a deeper look at what we saw from the Buckeye defense on Saturday.

In coverage, Knowles primarily called for Cover 4:

Both corners and both safeties are responsible for a deep ¼ of the field. The Mike linebacker is responsible for the hook, and the Will linebacker and nickel are responsible for the curl-flat zones.

Additionally, Knowles ran quite a bit of Cover 8, which is a variation of quarter-quarter-half coverage where the defense plays Cover 2 to the field and Cover 4 to the boundary:

We also saw a fair amount of Tampa-2 coverage, particularly out of a 3-high safety look on passing downs:

At one point, Knowles even ran a new type of Tampa-2 coverage with just a 3-man rush and Caleb Downs as a spy:

Lastly, Knowles called for Cover 1 Lurk a few times throughout the day:

Note how Arvell Reese (the Mike linebacker) is in the low hole with eyes on the quarterback, there is one deep safety, and everyone else is in man coverage.

Knowles also finally appears to have installed a creeper that he plans to run on a consistent basis. Remember, a creeper is a 4-man pressure with a back-7 player as one of the rushers and a defensive lineman dropping into coverage.

Knowles’ new creeper is an A-gap creeper (paired with Cover 3 Buzz coverage) with the linebacker to the 3-technique’s side blitzing and reading the center to determine which A-gap to rush. If the center opens up toward the blitzing linebacker, he will fight over top to the opposite A-gap. If the center opens up away from the blitzing linebacker, he will insert to the near A-gap off the center’s backside. Meanwhile, the nose tackle is stunting to the B-gap and the 3-technique becomes a contain rusher in place of the defensive end who drops into coverage.

See a couple examples and the diagram below:

Note how the defensive end to the 3-technique’s side drops into coverage.

The Buckeyes also defended the run very well throughout the day. For example, when Akron runs Split Zone in the following clip, the entire defensive line holds their gaps, and the linebackers all fall back into the correct gaps while the field safety (Downs) comes up to meet the ballcarrier in the B-gap for no gain:

From a coverage standpoint, it appears as if Knowles has truly evolved from a scheme centered around single-high coverages (Cover 1 and Cover 3) to a scheme that primarily uses coverages with two deep safeties (Cover 2, Cover 4, Cover 6, and Cover 8). It will be interesting to see if this trend continues, or if Knowles is just experimenting with some different concepts in these early games.