2021 Preview: New Mexico Banks On Defense With Gonzales
Can the Lobos build an MWC counter-culture in the desert?
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at UL-Monroe. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
The Mountain West is in need of a counter-culture program. The conference has seen significant improvement in the last decade or so (though it did take a step back in 2020) thanks to a number of good hires at major programs and a general raising of the ceiling across the league, but it has done so in largely similar ways at most improving programs. As in the rest of college football right now, you win with offense in the MWC.
That approach worked for years at Boise State - and still does - and helped programs like Utah State, Nevada, Fresno State and Hawaii catch on and move up the conference ranks in recent years. However, that dynamic has also created a conference without a ton of diversity in approach. There have been patches of differing approaches, like at San Diego State under Rocky Long or the consistently strange stalwarts Air Force and Wyoming, but the hegemony here is fairly strong.
If 2020 was any indication, it looks like there may be room for at least one program to run counter to that, however, and more likely than not, there’s space for two, or even three. First, the most established of the bunch and the best - as of right now - at this approach is San Jose State. Brent Brennan has built a really strong team all around, but the defense is what’s special about that group. San Jose State is the defensive king in the conference until further notice, but it was awesome in 2020, so SJSU won’t be on the preview list for quite some time.
Second, the topic of today’s newsletter: The New Mexico Lobos. New Mexico knew exactly what it was doing in hiring former Long assistant and native son Danny Gonzales, one of the brightest and most creative defense minds in college football. It wanted to build that counter-culture, a program that wins with a strong rushing attack that does enough to get the job done, paired with an elite defense designed around stopping the kind of modern offenses that have dominated the MWC. Even if this doesn’t work - I think it will, but we’ll see - New Mexico should be commended for having a plan for its program and hiring a coach that plays well into that plan. Gonzales is just about the perfect fit for New Mexico in its current state, with its current end-goal.
With that said, this is going to take some time. Bob Davie left the cupboard not quite bare, but pretty close to it, and Gonzales had to do some rapid patchwork to field an even somewhat competent team in 2020. That, mixed with the extraordinary circumstances of the outside world that forced UNM to play every single one of its games outside of its home state, created a team that the advanced metrics do not much care for, and a team that lost its first five games. Neither of those data points are especially encouraging, and further the idea that this is going to take some time. Gonzales is recruiting well and seems to have a plan to build the talent pool back up, but don’t expect this team to look like it wants to for at least two or three more years.
So, what does this team want to look like? Well, I’ll let Gonzales explain that.
“We are 3-3-5 by personnel,” Gonzales said in 2018. “I was taught a long time ago by (San Diego State coach Rocky) Long, (Virginia coach Bronco) Mendenhall, every spring you identify your best 22 players and you develop your scheme around them.
“So, if you have four d-linemen that are just unbelievable, you just take one of those linebackers out and you put an extra lineman in. If you take out a DB, because you have linebackers that are your best players, then put in an extra linebacker. Take out a DB. You put your best 22 on the field.”
Obviously, that’s quite a bit easier said than done, but Gonzales was true to his word in 2020 even without his own personnel (read: recruits) available and it really started to click together at the end of the season when New Mexico won its final two games. I think that Lobos team - the one that beat Wyoming and Fresno State - is much closer to representative of the job that Gonzales and his staff did than the team that lost its first five games. This was not a good team by any means, but that it pops up this early in the preview series is reflective more of just how bad things were early on in the season, not necessarily of what this team actually was by the time it finished the year.
In working the scheme around the players in 2020, New Mexico did two main things. Firstly, on offense, coordinator Derek Warehime looked to make things as easy as possible, while leaning heavily on the talent that he knew he could trust. After losing every single scholarship quarterback throughout the span of the season (New Mexico finished the year with walk-on freshman Isaiah Chavez), Warehime just went with what was working, which was largely just halfback Bobby Cole and his backup, Nathaniel Jones. Chavez ran a decent amount too in the final game of the season and will likely battle for the starting job in 2021, though with Cole and Jones back, I expect that this will be a run heavy team once again this upcoming season - though the return of senior slot receiver Emmanuel Logan-Greene will help out whoever end up winning that signal caller spot.
The other side of the ball is Gonzales’ sweet spot and will be the defining feature of his program, so that’s the one that we’ll take a closer look at. In 2020, the Lobos were strongest within the front six, which was filled to the brim with hybrid, tweener athletes. So, Gonzales built his defense around that versatility up front, which was already a strong suit of his (and Long’s, who coordinates this defense) because of his love of stunts up front.
In practice, that looks a lot like this. This is an extreme example, of course, but in an obvious passing situation, UNM comes out with just two down linemen, surrounded by four of those hybrid linebacker types all in the box, with five defensive backs in a pretty standard two-high safety look. Because New Mexico has six in the box with just two down linemen, it really doesn’t have to telegraph where the pressure will be coming from before the snap here, making things much harder on the quarterback and the offensive line, which will have to instead adjust to any sort of pressure on the fly. The backfield is just running cover 2, with the nickel back keying on the halfback to the flats, because Fresno State loves passes into the flats.
Nothing too complex, right? However, because the line can’t prepare for the pressure pattern here, this essentially serves as a blitz, without needing to bring any extra rushers (at least not until the play breaks down and the linebackers collapse in to cover the quarterback keeper.). New Mexico is able to drop seven into coverage as you would in a heavy-pass coverage look, while still attacking the offensive line and creating a numbers advantage, just through manipulating the pre-snap reads and forcing that in-play adjustment. The big secret about college football is that offensive linemen at this level are largely very, very bad at adjusting to strange looks, and Gonzales basically built his entire defense out of that.
Similar idea here, with a similar result. New Mexico is still bringing just four rushers, but it doesn’t announce where the rush is coming from before the play. It puts four defenders up on the line but drops the field edge defenders back into a zone, replacing his pressure with pressure up the middle from one of the linebackers. That essentially eliminates the job of the left tackle, who is now without an edge defender to block, while the three remaining linemen are able to keep the attention of the remaining offensive line players, creating a hole for that blitzer to shoot, with the halfback alone in the backfield in charge of picking him up.
Firstly, I don’t have to tell you all that you don’t generally want your running back to have to do this. It can allow that linebacker to collapse the pocket and disrupt the quarterback even if he doesn’t touch him, which is exactly what happens here. Secondly, you can’t send that halfback into the flats anymore. He has to help as a blocker, which means that at best, you’re going to have four receivers running into a seven-man backfield. I write all the time about creating numbers advantages as an offense - here’s how Gonzales does it on defense.
Hell, New Mexico can even do it with just three. When anybody in your box can drop into coverage or rush the passer comfortably on any play, it’s going to make things quite a bit trickier for the offense.
When you can do that with just three or four rushers, it makes actual pressure packages that much more dangerous. New Mexico lines up showing blitz here with five on the line and adds a sixth as the quarterback snaps the ball, giving the offensive line no time to adapt and pick up the extra man. The five initial rushers are able to completely suck up the offensive line, creating a straight shot off the edge for that safety to the quarterback, making up for the lack of coverage in the defensive backfield - though I will say, the linebacker does a fucking awesome job in picking up the running back here. This is a hard thing to do and he absolutely nailed it.
These heavier pressure looks work really well in obvious rushing situations too (as the last one was, despite the play call). Because New Mexico varies its box but always has six defenders in there at a minimum, it can account for gaps with relative ease. When you add a blitz call to the mix, those run fits are going take hold a lot quicker and can stuff short yardage situations like this one.
Gonzales even has looks like this, which are going to be quite a bit more dangerous as his defenders improve and become more comfortable in this system. Four-man pressure again here, this time primarily up the middle, with the boundary edge defender backing off at the snap and moving into a zone, while the other edge defender does something so brilliant that, frankly, it should be illegal: He covers the damn flat.
See, Carson Strong is watching these linebackers very closely here. He knows that New Mexico likes to vary its pressure and drop defenders into coverage, and he sees at the snap that he has pressure coming up the middle. The read, in that case, is to get it off to the flats quickly - duh - because there aren’t any linebackers to cover it, right? Those guys are in the backfield, and you only need four yards! What could go wrong?
Well, that no longer works when the defensive end to the field can chase down the halfback and slow him down enough for the linebackers to get out there, and Gonzales knows that, so he schemes this up pretty consistently on third-and-medium. The interior pressure induces that checkdown, and that checkdown goes directly into the arms of a defensive end focusing all of his energy on covering it.
Again, it didn’t work perfectly in 2020 because the talent just wasn’t there, but this is insanely good shit. This is the kind of thing that will be absolutely lethal in three years when Gonzales has built an entire defense out of 6-foot-4, 225-pound end/linebacker/safety types and every single member of the team can make this play with their eyes closed.
That’s the goal for this defense, and that’s why I really, really love what I’m seeing from Gonzales at New Mexico so far - even if it isn’t there yet, this staff and its administration are all on the exact same page. They have an ideology that they believe in and a plan that they feel will work to return New Mexico to the upper-echelon of the Mountain West. Again, it won’t work right away, but New Mexico is returning 14 seniors in 2021 that would have graduated in a normal year, along with quite a bit of young talent, while reeling in the school’s best recruiting class since 2016. If Gonzales sticks around, as it seems he intends to, he can - and likely will build a serious conference contender out in the desert - and he’s going to do it his way.