When the Texas Longhorns decided to hire Chris Ash as the new defensive coordinator for the 2020 season, one of the first things I wanted to do was research his history. The first job people wanted to bring up was Rutgers. It was his most recent stop and it was anything but successful. Ash was relieved of his duties before he got very far into the 2019 year. However, he had a lot of success at Ohio State as the defensive coordinator on a National Championship team.
Phil Harrison of Buckeyes Wire spoke about his impact, specifically on his tackling style that helped Ohio State.
Another thing Ash brought to Ohio State was the concept of rugby-style tackling instead of traditional violent hitting and wrapping to bring a ball carrier down. It took convincing, but Meyer relented and Ohio State went from being a defense that missed a ton of tackles, to one that improved greatly. He’ll likely bring the same thing to Texas.
During media availability session on Tuesday, Ash was asked about this style of tackling. What exactly is rugby tackling?
“There is a lot of people out there that refer to a certain tackling style as rugby tackling,” Ash started out. “It’s just shoulder tackling. Years ago player safety became a really hot topic of conversation around how we coach the game. As we went and researched how we could make this game safer, a lot of those conversations were around tackling. We wanted to be on the forefront of trying to tackle in a way that we could reduce the number of blows to the head.”
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“There is an old school way to do it and there is a new school way to do it. I studied a lot of Rugby. I see the physicality in those styles of tackling and they don’t have helmets, they don’t have protective gear on. They are using their shoulder. I really thought this is something that we could use in football. Some people were using it before. It was something we incorporated back in 2014.”
For the Longhorns defense, getting better at bringing down the ball carrier is a must. In the Big 12 Conference, especially a team like Oklahoma, making solid tackles in the open field is a must. Much like Harrison said, he improved the Buckeyes tackling. Plus as Chris Ash spoke about, player safety should be a forefront of everyones minds.
“I just think it is the safest way to tackle and honestly it is the most effective way. It’s the way most of the players tackle anyway. So as I studied that and looked at that, I’m like why are we not teaching that this way. And we made a huge transition several years ago. It’s been good to us ever since.”