2021 Preview: South Alabama Has Opted For Chaos
Kane Wommack, welcome to the Sun Belt. Here's your gun, and 65 hours of Coastal Carolina tape. Good luck!
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at Northern Illinois. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
South Alabama might be the largest sleeping giant in the Sun Belt, or at least the team best positioned to rise to power in the coming years. Allow me to explain. Firstly, Mobile, Ala., is a pretty great place to put your G5 team, both for recruiting proximity and access to a fanbase. It’s a two-hour drive from New Orleans, three-and-a-half from Tallahassee and two-and-a-half from Montgomery, not to mention that Mobile is itself a strong producer of plenty of three-star talent.
Secondly, there’s investment here, which is a big deal anywhere, but especially at a Sun Belt school. South Alabama has a brand new, first used in 2020, $78 million stadium that seats 25,000. Get this program cooking in the right way, and that place will be both packed and miserable for opponents to visit every single home game. Add in the massive Jaguar Training Center, unveiled in 2018, and it' becomes pretty obvious that this is a program that wants to be winning football games and is serious about doing what it takes to do that, including the significant facility spending needed to win a lot of those tight recruiting battles.
Lastly, South Alabama is in the Sun Belt West, already the weaker of the two divisions, which has just lost a coach from its previous No. 2 program (Arkansas State) and could lose No. 1 (Billy Napier at Louisiana) at pretty much any time. That’s a vacuum. There’s room here for a new program to take over as No. 2 if Arkansas State falls back and South Alabama has the talent base and university buy-in needed to do that.
Now, it has the coach to not only challenge for that spot, but to give Louisiana a serious test for that No. 1 spot if this breaks well for him in the next few years. Former Indiana defensive coordinator Kane Wommack was announced as the replacement for Steve Campbell on Dec. 12, marking both the start of a new era and the start of a pretty significant shift in program culture and identity. South Alabama is going from the established, offense-first program builder to a 33-year-old first-time head coach with a propensity for comically chaotic defenses and energetic, well, everything. South Alabama wanted an infusion of life, and Wommack brings that in droves.
This is the part where I usually talk about the downsides of the program. This was, after all, one of the worst teams in America last year, despite a 4-7 record that might indicate otherwise. The offense was anemic and frequently put a (truly, not too bad) defense in terrible situations. Wommack is a brand new head coach, and while he has ties to the area and the university, this is still the youngest coach in the nation, doing this job for the first time. That’s a risk. This roster isn’t spectacular by any means, and this has been a program without any real direction for several years now.
However, none of that really sticks with me when I look at this team and this job, and I think a lot of it has to do with those program-wide factors and with the fact that the cupboard is not bare. South Alabama is set to return a number of impact seniors that would’ve had to depart in a normal year, including cornerback Devin Rockette, linebackers Christian Bell, Chris Henderson and Shawn Jennings and safety Tré Young, all of whom started or contributed for the Jaguars defense in 2020. In total, eight of South Alabama’s 10 leading tacklers will be back (barring transfer news that I may have missed) and that doesn’t even count Bell, Henderson, Young or non-senior contributors like cornerback Davyn Flenord, lineman Jamie Sheriff or linebacker Kelvin Johnson.
On top of that, star receiver Jalen Tolbert is back and will be paired up with Jake Bentley, a transfer quarterback from Utah. Leading running back Carlos Davis, backup halfbacks Terrion Avery and Jared Wilson and wideout Jalen Wayne all appear to be returning on the offense as well (though none are seniors).
Now, I do have some concerns about the fact that a large chunk of this starting lineup will be upperclassmen in 2021. There were not a ton of young contributors on the team in 2020 either, so this is going to be a group made up primarily of juniors and seniors. That’s a good thing for immediate production and I think there’s a very good chance that South Alabama is No. 2 in the West in 2021, but that will be problematic down the road if Wommack can’t find some new faces to contribute. Campbell left talent, but not a ton of established depth.
Charged with working with that top group and developing deeper talent? A pair of brand new coordinators and an entirely new look staff. Wommack brought in former Houston head coach Major Applewhite to run his offense, while leaning into his Ole Miss and Hugh Freeze (Wommack worked as a GA at Ole Miss in 2012-13 and his dad Dave was Freeze’s DC at both Ole Miss and Arkansas State) ties in hiring Corey Batoon as DC. Batoon served in several roles under Freeze at both ASU and Ole Miss, before becoming the safeties coach for Freeze at Liberty last February.
The rest of the staff is a weird mixed bag of sorts between SEC/Freeze guys, FCS risers, Indiana connections and a bizarre amount of MAC representation in the form of Jamael Lett and Will Windham. Rob Ezell came with Applewhite from Alabama (where he was a quality control coach last year) and Michael Smith is a long-time SEC assistant. I will credit a few of the creative hires, like former McGill-Toolen (one of the top high schools in Mobile) head coach Earnest Hill; Gordon Steele, who built a really good offensive line with Murray State and Indiana player personnel director Dwike Wilson (who did a lot of work to establish a Florida pipeline to IU).
I don’t love this group, especially at the top, where I have some pretty serious doubts about Applewhite specifically (I don’t like Batoon either, but this isn’t his defense), but it isn’t terrible either. Hill and Wilson should be strong recruiters right away, and while Applewhite and Batoon aren’t my favorite picks for those roles, they can also hold their own on the recruiting trail.
I am, I’ll admit, curious about the Applewhite fit with Bentley. Bentley wasn’t anything amazing with Utah last season, but the Utes finished with the No. 33 passing success rate, but an explosiveness metric down at 105. In other words, Bentley is going to throw the football about eight yards down the field in an offense designed for him. Applewhite’s last Houston offense, for reference, was 43rd in success rate and 11th in explosiveness. That’s… not great. It doesn’t mean that Applewhite can’t kick on the most stereotypical air raid stuff (he is a Texas guy, after all), but he’s a lot closer to the bizarre vertical, read option shit that Tom Herman does than he is air raid. Bentley can’t really do either of those things.
Who knows, maybe Desmond Trotter wins the job straight up. I’m not convinced right now that he’s not better than Bentley. But the fit right now with the grad transfer doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, especially because Tolbert, the best leading receiver, was an absolute nightmare to cover down the field last season. It feels like leaning into that with Applewhite and Trotter would be a much better fit, even if the offensive line isn’t especially good (that’s the elephant in the room, of course).
Enough about offense, though. Wommack is a defensive guy, this is going to be a defense-first program, and I’ll tell you right now on Feb. 3, about seven months out from the start of the season, that this defense has a real good shot at kicking ass in 2021. As mentioned, just about every contributor is both back and an upperclassmen, and they’ll be moving into one of my favorite schemes that I watched in 2020.
Wommack, like his dad at Ole Miss, has built a system around creating mayhem with aggressive blitzes, largely running zone behind that, and then hitting anyone that has the ball as hard as you possibly can as soon as you possibly can. Indiana was 50th in success rate allowed, 49th in explosiveness and 25th in havoc rate last season, which essentially means that if you were able to get the ball past the line of scrimmage in any way, it usually meant that you were going to do pretty well. The trick, however, was getting it there, because the Hoosiers sold out its front six constantly to stop any and every play behind the LOS, while leaving the back of the defense largely in place to take advantage of stupid throws (IU forced 13 interceptions in eight games).
That’s, admittedly, a risky way to build a defense. If you don’t have athletes up front that can get into the backfield quickly, if you lack strong zone defensive backs, or even if the guys in your secondary just can’t catch very well, this all becomes a very shaky foundation. The reward here is very high (see Ole Miss circa 2014), as is the potential for failure if you don’t have the horses, or if too many bounces go the wrong way (see Ole Miss circa 2016).
While I think that South Alabama has the dudes needed to pull this off in the Sun Belt this year, there is that risk factor, and that’s worth consideration when looking at the state of this program both in 2021 and moving forward. Wommack can be excellent everywhere else, but if he doesn’t have two quick thumpers at linebacker, an edge rushing linebacker, two good outside cornerbacks and a tweener rover that can do a little bit of everything, this isn’t going to work.
So, how does Wommack go about creating all of this havoc? This is, as mentioned, a 3-3-5 defense with a rover and a slot corner, that operates primarily out of single-high but can work that rover into a two-high look if needed. The base look has three down linemen, a fourth rusher that can come from just about anywhere (Indiana almost never brought just three rushers) and then usually a pretty standard cover 3 shell. Indiana has a few man looks, but this is primarily a zone team, based around vision-and-break rather than pattern matching, meaning that those defenders are pretty committed to their zones and break based on the quarterback’s eyes, rather than based on a route.
This doesn’t have the edge rusher right up on the line, but this is a good look at what I mean. Cover 3 shell, with a pair of hook zones from the interior linebackers, buzz zones for the slot corner and rover, and then deep-thirds on the outside and at safety. Deep safety and the field cornerback read the quarterback’s eyes well and break on this dig concept in time to make the interception.
That’s fine. It’s a strong base look (albeit one that may be a little outdated soon as the sport shifts back to two-high looks) and one that can shift around pretty easily when optimized with a very versatile personnel grouping.
Where Wommack really shines, though, and where that havoc comes from is the blitz packages, of which Wommack has roughly 10,000. This man loves interior pressure and will throw it at an opponent constantly, usually with at least one other rusher coming either off the edge or on a delayed interior rush behind that first rusher. Here, Indiana is looking to shoot the B gap with a middle linebacker while the front three slants away, hoping to pull the left tackle in to pick that up.
He does here, which is the goal for Indiana, because the real intended pressure is coming off of the edge. Indiana wants to create either a free shot at the quarterback or a matchup with the halfback (as it gets here) for that edge rusher, who’s usually going to be a much smaller, quicker player. When done correctly, the slants up front, B gap blitz and stunt fake from the boundary linebacker will take up the entire offensive line, with that boundary linebacker moving into a spy zone to keep the quarterback from escaping, meaning that the offensive line is using five players to block four defenders.
That’s what happens here, the field rusher blows up the halfback and gets to the quarterback. Again, this requires specific talent, but it’s really hard to deal with when it’s done well with solid talent, because that offensive line is really going to want to react to the slants up front.
Against teams looking to attack quickly (RPO teams), Indiana usually limited itself to four or five rushers, but will get creative with where the pressure is coming from, which can do wonders against both the pass and the run. Ole Miss is absolutely doomed from the start here, because it has a back side pull on this RPO, and Indiana is shooting a linebacker right into the front side B gap, meaning that the guard is going to either have to react on the fly, or whoever has the ball in the backfield is going to get defenestrated. Note the finish on this play. I wasn’t kidding when I said that these guys hit as hard as they possibly can. Wommack defenses want to knock your goddamn head off.
While you won’t likely see them a ton unless South Alabam is playing against a team that really wants to throw the ball down the field when it does throw (hello, Coastal Carolina, Louisiana and Arkansas State), Wommack has some fantastic heavier blitz packages too. He brings five again here, with a double into the A gap followed by that single-high safety screaming directly into the space created by that double.
This is probably my favorite Wommack play, to the point where I had to stop myself from drawing it up while writing about it. Indiana again fakes that rush off the edge to the boundary, dropping that linebacker into a hook zone, with the tackle responsibility replaced by the nearest defensive lineman. It does the same on the other side, dropping a linebacker off the edge and into a hook zone, replacing him with a defensive lineman working his way out to the tackle. That leaves two guards, a center and a halfback to deal with for Indiana.
To do, it throws that double in there with the middle linebackers. They’re going to overlap to either side, with the intended goal of drawing the center by running across his face to get to the right guard (which it does) while taking out the other guard with that second overlap, leaving the halfback entirely responsible for a safety that’s hoping to commit a war crime on him.
Ohio State’s left guard actually fucks this up by following that replacement end to the field (which isn’t entirely unheard of, especially with inexperienced linemen), which means that the halfback is now responsible for the second overlap, which mean, of course, that Indiana has created a direct path to the quarterback for that safety. Beautiful, beautiful design.
He even has seven-man stuff, which I’m not going to get too far into, but that I did include to again make the point about the kind of physicality you’re going to see from these guys. Indiana’s defense bought in fully to the ideology that Wommack was selling it, and became one of the meanest defenses in the country.
That’s the goal here at South Alabama. The offense will be fine - good, even - if the recruiting is as good as it should be, but this is a team that wants to win games by beating the ever-loving shit out of the opposing offense every time it snaps the ball. If Wommack can recruit to that and inspire the kind of buy-in that he did at Indiana, watch out, because the Sun Belt might have a new bully on the block.