Defensively Speaking: The Overload Front

Ohio State’s defensive performance against Western Michigan was yet another dominant showing against an overmatched opponent. It’s tough to take much away from games where the talent gap is so wide. However, I think it’s worth highlighting that Jim Knowles once again showed that he’s looking to get more creative with his pressure schemes this season.

Against Akron, we saw Knowles call for creeper pressures quite a few times. Against Western Michigan, Knowles rolled out an “overload” front look on 3^rd down passing situations a few times. An overload front simply means that both the nose tackle and the 3-technique are aligned on the same side of the offensive line, which results in having ¾ of your defensive line on one side of the offensive line as opposed to having two defensive linemen to each side of the center. See below:

Note how Ohio State has a 1-technique, a 3-technique, and a defensive end all to the left of the center. This was the look Ohio State used on the first 3^rd down of the game, and they ran a Cover 1 cross-dog blitz that resulted in a sack:

This was designed to be just a 5-man pressure with JT Tuimoloau in man coverage on the running back. However, Tuimoloau is “hug” rushing, which means he is allowed to insert as an extra rusher if the running back stays in to block. Therefore, it ultimately became a 6-man pressure.

Later in the game, Knowles again used an overload front on 3^rd down – this time with the Will linebacker (Sonny Styles) mugged over the guard away from the overload side of the line:

With five men on the line of scrimmage, Knowles called for another Cover 1 5-man pressure with the mugged linebacker (Styles) looking to “pick” the right guard and center and free up a lane for the nose tackle (Ty Hamilton) to loop around. See the clips and diagram of this play below:

I give Western Michigan’s right guard credit on this play for passing Styles off and staying home to pick up Hamilton. Because of this and how quickly the quarterback got rid of the ball, the pressure did not get home. However, I still think this play is worth examining because it’s something new that we haven’t seen from Knowles before.

Although there is not much to take away from such a lopsided victory against an opponent who never had a chance, I wanted to give Knowles some credit for his efforts to diversify his pressure calls because I have been critical of his lack of creativity on 3^rd down in the past. Using overload fronts is a very simple, yet effective way to be less predictable on 3^rd down. It’ll be interesting to see if this trend continues against Marshall.