New name from Big 12 potentially added to Auburn coaching search

Auburn’s search for its new head coach possibly has a new candidate in West Virginia head coach Neal Brown.

The Auburn coaching search has reached its sixth day and there is seemingly no end in sight as a number of candidates are expected to interview for the job in the coming days.

A new name has been added to that mix in West Virginia head coach Neal Brown, per Steven Godfrey.

The 40-year-old Brown is in his second year in Morgantown after leading Troy to success from 2015-18, winning 10 games for three straight seasons. The Mountaineers are 10-11 in his two seasons in charge.

He also has ties within the SEC, serving as the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach at Kentucky from 2013-14.

On Friday night, it was reported that five coaches — Kevin Steele, Steve Sarkisian, Billy Napier, Tony Elliott and Brent Venables — have received invitations for an interview. On Saturday, Elliott, Clemson’s offensive coordinator, issued a statement saying he has not talked to Auburn nor will be interviewing.

Auburn Coaching Search 3.0: Breaking down the 5 candidates for next head coach

Clemson OC Tony Elliott says he is not interviewing with Auburn

Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott released a statement saying he is not interviewing for the Auburn head coach position.

On Friday night, news broke that Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott was set to interview for the Auburn head coach position sometime in the next few days.

Elliott made it clear on Saturday morning that wasn’t the case.

ESPN’s Marty Smith tweeted a statement he received from the Tigers offensive coordinator stating his intentions.

Auburn is set to interview at least four candidates for the vacant position including Elliott’s counterpart Brent Venables, the Clemson defensive coordinator.

Report: Auburn to interview five candidates for head coach position

Auburn has invited five different men to interview for the vacant head football coaching position.

Auburn has narrowed down its list for the replacement of Gus Malzahn.

Per Auburn Undercover, the search firm and advisory board that are helping the university hire the next head football coach has settled on five men: Auburn defensive coordinator/interim head coach Kevin Steele, Louisiana head coach Billy Napier, Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian, Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables and Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott.

From Phillip Marshall:

The committee appointed by president Jay Gogue hopes to complete its business by next Wednesday, though it could go into the week after Christmas.

This story will be updated.

Getting Home, Part 5: Clemson’s Brent Venables is showing NFL defenses how to evolve

Innovations tends to trickle up in football, and who better to steal from than the Tigers?

During his speech for Derrick Thomas’ posthumous Hall of Fame induction, former Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson told a story about a young defensive coordinator named Bill Cowher who thought he had come up with a great new scheme involving his talented pass rusher.

“In the spring of 1990, Bill Cowher came to [Chiefs coach] Marty [Schottenheimer], said ‘Marty, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we do this on the defense?’” Peterson recalled. “’We’ll get Derrick lined up in his three-point stance in his normal position, right outside linebacker. Then on the snap of the ball, we’ll drop him into coverage [and] we’ll bring a couple of guys.’”

On paper, it makes some sense to use Derrick Thomas as a decoy. If an offensive line is sliding his way, why not overload the other side of the protection? This was the theory behind the fire zone blitz concept made famous at the NFL level by Dick LaBeau, which was growing in popularity around the league at that time. Cowher recognized the trend and wanted in. Schottenheimer and Peterson had a different take.

“I said, ‘Bill, that’s a very interesting concept. Just answer me one question: Why would we be having our best pass rusher run away from the quarterback?’ Derrick that year had 20 sacks, and I think without question, that’s called great coaching.”

Over the course of this series, I’ve argued that NFL defenses should rush the passer more aggressively and have looked at different ways the more creative defensive play-callers go about doing so. But I want to make one thing clear: Personnel should be the most important factor when making these decisions. If you have a Derrick Thomas or a defensive line like the one the 49ers have built over the past few years, it doesn’t make much sense to run creepers or big blitzes.

Chris Vasseur, an influential high school defensive coordinator and host of the popular Make Defense Great Again podcast, put it best:

“Every once in a while you might drop a great pass rusher [into coverage]. But if you’re dropping Von Miller a lot, you’re an asshole.”

No, you should not be dropping Von Miller or Derrick Thomas or Nick Bosa into coverage very often, but those guys are hard to find and very expensive to keep. If you’re one of the many NFL teams that don’t have one of those studs on the roster, then you better get creative.

The nature of getting creative, though, has changed because offenses are so much more diverse than they once were. It’s no longer enough to just send an old fire zone blitz now that spread offenses allow quarterbacks to utilize the width of the field.

“Playing three-deep, three-under is not great,” Vasseur told me, “when they’re releasing five out into the route, because they can stretch you horizontally.”

Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, those fire zones made more sense. Offenses were playing with multiple bodies in the backfield and weren’t able to exploit the flats or underneath. They eventually adapted and evolved to combat the three-deep, three-under coverages that became the default blitz coverage. The “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams were one of the products of that evolution, says former Vikings coach Mike Tice.

“One of the guys who was on the forefront of the new era of football was Mike Martz.” Tice told me. “He had ‘hots’ built into his routes and that created explosive gains. The defense was creating a hole in the coverage and Martz did a great job of exploiting those holes. That’s what football has gone to now: Spread the field out, make the defense defend the entire field. But in order to do that, you get fewer blockers.”

You can send that extra rusher and drop a defensive end, but now that 260-pound player has to cover Isaac Bruce on a quick slant or Marshall Faulk out of the backfield. That’s not ideal. The only way to combat that was to be really talented, like Tony Dungy’s Buccaneers were at the time, or creative with your pressures, like Jim Johnson’s Eagles were at the time.

At the college level, it didn’t take long for the spread to, well, spread, and the first inclination for defensive coaches was to attack it. But they were having the same problems NFL defensive coordinators were having with the Rams.

“Now, I don’t have the PFF data to back this up — this is just my gut — but here’s what I think happened,” Vasseur says. “Offenses spread out and defenses were like ‘[Expletive] you. We’re going to bring the house.’ And offenses were able to make them pay. As soon as they were able to make them pay, then everybody backed off. In college, everybody played four-down and played quarters or Cover 2. Recently, there’s been a shift towards getting more creative.”

That creativity has taken many forms at the college level:

But when I think of a scheme that’s on the cutting edge, at least from the NFL perspective, it’s Brent Venables’ Clemson defense. Especially when it comes to pressure.

One of Venables’ pressure concepts aims to take away the “hots” that Martz built into his play designs to beat more traditional blitzes, while not sacrificing numbers in the pass rush. It is fittingly referred to as “hot” coverage, and it was popularized by Mark Dantonio and Pat Narduzzi at Michigan State. Hot coverage is a more aggressive version of the old fire zone blitzes.

Instead of a five-man rush, you have six rushers going after the quarterback, leaving only five zone coverage players in a three-deep, two under distribution.

The seam players — labeled “poach” above — are the key to the coverage. They’ll read the quarterback’s eyes and position themselves based on where he looks. If the quarterback looks to your side, you hold your ground and try to get into any throwing windows. If the quarterback looks away from your side, you squeeze to the middle of the field.

The backside corner gets similar instructions against a two-receiver side. If the quarterback looks to the opposite side, Venables tells his corners to overlap to the inside receiver because it’s hard for the quarterback to get all the way to the backside receiver with a six-man rush bearing down on him. To account for running backs going to the flats, which would overload the “hot” player, defensive ends will “peel” with the back if he goes out for a pass.

Venables uses basketball team names for his different hot pressures — Spurs, Clippers, Mavericks, etc. — and my totally uneducated theory on that choice is how this football version of a 2-3 zone shifts like one you’d see in basketball. Only instead of the position of the ball dictating how the zone shifts in unison, it’s the vision of the quarterback that dictates where players should move.

This may not sound like a viable concept at the NFL level, where quarterbacks are much better, but the Colts actually used these pressures last season and had some success with them. While Venables and Narduzzi will usually run them out of a two-deep shell, Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus called them with various pre-snap looks. Darius Leonard’s pick-6 of Jameis Winston came on a three-deep, two under concept where he lined up over center before snap.

If you read Part 3 of this series, you’ll recognize the concept behind Venables’ “Miami” pressure, a more extreme version of the read blitzes the Patriots bullied Sam Darnold with during the “seeing ghosts” game. Instead of having certain pass rushers read the turn of specific blockers, like the Patriots do, any rusher who is engaged by a blocker will drop into coverage.

From Brent Venables playbook.

That leads to hilarious plays like this one where Clemson gets a sack with a one-man pass rush.

None of the concepts I’ve covered throughout this series are really new. A lot of them date back to the early 2000s and even the 1990s, but they’ve been repackaged and their popularity has grown at the college level. As that continues, it’s only a matter of time before defensive coaches at the NFL take notice. Some of the best ones, who don’t have a Derrick Thomas to run around the edge and sack the quarterback, have already done so.

The rest of the league should work to catch up, though. It took too long for offensive coaches to truly embrace the pass-first spread offense that we know, from looking at hard data, is more effective. And now it’s taking too long for defensive coaches to break from conservative schemes and truly get creative about forcing offenses into mismatches — even though, again, we can look at the numbers and see that creating pressure is essential.

It doesn’t have to be the Ravens’ protection-dictating looks we covered in Part 2 or the Patriots’ Cover 0 blitzes covered in Part 3 or the Titans’ creepers covered in Part 4. There are countless pressure concepts out there that we did not touch on in this series. Just try something. Even “Engage Eight” might be a better option than calling a standard four-man rush and just hoping it gets home.

Ohio State vs. Clemson: 3 reasons the Tigers could give the Buckeyes problems in Fiesta Bowl

Ohio State and Clemson are about to face off in the Fiesta Bowl. Here’s three reasons a talented Tigers squad could give the Buckeyes fits.

The Ohio State football team is looking to continue this unbelievable journey it has been on in 2019, but there is a whale of a team standing in its way out in the desert. The Clemson Tigers are the defending national champions and have won the title two out of the last three years.

There’s not many teams that match up athletically with this Buckeye squad, but Clemson is no doubt one of them. There are interesting storylines and matchups across the board, and there’s no doubt the Buckeyes will have to play their best game of the year to move on to New Orleans for a shot at a national championship.

But it won’t be easy. Here’s three reasons the Clemson Tigers could give Ohio State fits out in Glendale.

Next … Talent

Find out what select members of Clemson’s defense said about Ohio State

Ohio State and Clemson were both made available to the media today. Find out what select members of Clemson’s defense said about Ohio State.

While you were getting ready for Christmas and whatever shenanigans and celebrations you’ll be a part of tonight and tomorrow, the Fiesta Bowl set up a little media event for select Ohio State and Clemson players and coaches.

We normally bring you the comments of the other team after an Ohio State game, but in this case we have a ton of quotes from a few of the most notable players and coaches getting ready to suit up for the defending national champion Tigers.

We had defensive and offensive players and coaches to speak on what they saw on both sides of the ball for the Buckeyes and we’re bringing them all to you.

We brought you the offensive players and coaches, and next up is the defensive side of the ball.

Next … Quotes from Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables