Cincinnati's Defense Is Built For This
Remember what Auburn did to Alabama? Here's a better version of that defense. Good luck!
This is the second of a three-part preview for Cincinnati’s playoff semifinal matchup against Alabama, slated to kick off at 3:30 p.m., on Dec. 31. Friday’s story will take a more general look at how the Bearcats can win and Monday’s broke down the UC offense against Alabama’s defense, but today’s is a dive into Cincinnati’s defense against the Alabama offense.
There isn’t a more fascinating unit matchup in the playoff, either tangible in the first-round or hypothetical in the national title game, more interesting than the Cincinnati defense – touted as one of the nation’s best and renowned for its ability to force turnovers and create havoc – against Alabama’s back-to-back Heisman-producing offense.
Georgia’s run defense against Hassan Haskins and Blake Corum is interesting, as is the Michigan defensive front against Georgia’s offensive line. Alabama’s linebackers against Jerome Ford is up there too. But the cream of the crop, the best of the best? That’s right here. Jameson Williams against Sauce Gardner. Coby Bryant against Slade Bolden. Bryce Young against the rest of the Cincinnati defense.
The Heisman-winning quarterback has been able to make magic all year playing hero ball, and now he’s playing against the defense best designed to punish that exact kind of play, with a pair of cornerbacks more capable of sticking to Alabama’s wideouts in man coverage than any group the Crimson Tide have faced this season. Cincinnati, meanwhile, has made a living out of living in the backfield and forcing those mistakes, and now it faces the ultimate big-play threat offense, wth a quarterback who has been at times unflappable when the pressure isn’t entirely overwhelming.
It’s an absolutely fascinated schematic and personnel matchup, one that will have an outsized role in determining the results of this game, given how much of an emphasis each team puts on its respective group. Alabama wants to win by blowing your doors off offensively, while Cincinnati wants to put you in a crock pot for four hours with smothering defense.
The winner will not be able to cruise, regardless of who ultimately claims the game. It’s going to come down to punches and counterpunches, adjustment sboth at the half and on the sidelines to everything that the other unit is showing, working to create tiny advantages that add up into razor-thin margins to determine the game. It’s like an NFL matchup, partially because these are units defined almost entirely by future pros and brilliant schematic coaches leading them.
And nowhere is that chess match more critical than in Cincinnati’s handling of the Alabama passing attack.
First things first here. Alabama is not going to be able to run the ball on Cincinnati. The Bearcats are extremely good at stuffing the run and will do so if needed for the first quarter, but there are not going to be yards to gain for an already bad Alabama rushing attack against this defense and the Crimson Tide will abandon that early if they don’t outright eschew it from the jump.
This offensive line is not getting the job done on the ground against a defense that can do this:
It just isn’t. Cincinnati’s defensive line is too goo at getting off of blocks, and its nearly five-man front with those creeping linebackers is too much for a good rushing attack to deal with. Alabama’s isn’t on that level, and will recognize that early. Let’s swipe that away. It isn’t going to be important here, unless Bill O’Brien has lost his mind. Brian Robinson Jr. is not determining the game here.
No, the real stuff is in the passing game. And it’s all going to start with Cincinnati’s ability to take away Williams.
Just like with Will Anderson Jr. on defense, Alabama has built so much of its attack around Williams’ ability to gash defenses with big plays, both on deep routes and on yards after the catch. It’s almost astonishing just how much of this offense is built around getting the ball in Williams’ hands as just about the only viable option.
And without a healthy John Metchie, it’s only going to be a bigger focus here. Williams blew the whole game open against Georgia with his ability to make big plays happen against a bad room of cornerbacks (relative to the rest of the Georgia defense) and Alabama needs him to repeat that performance here.
If he can, even against coverage from the fantastic Gardner, Alabama is going to win the football game. It just will. Cincinnati cannot withstand 200 yards and two scores from Williams and expect to keep up with that, especially given what it would do to the rest of the defense in contorting to try to stop him if man coverage isn’t working. He’s a gamebreaker in very sense of the word, and Cincinnati cannot afford to let him break this game.
The interesting thing, though, is that Williams can be limited. He’s not an unstoppable killing machine like Devonta Smith, nor is this offense writ large. He has been impacted by really good man coverage at different points this season, and though he’ll still get his touches, he can be bottled up if a defense has the personnel for it. And when he’s bottled up, the Alabama offense crumbles.
Auburn held him to two receptions for 43 yards with something man coverage like this, and the Alabama offense answered that with zero points in the first 51 minutes of play. Eventually the Auburn dam broke as its offense could not do anything to support the defense, but Alabama did not have an answer without its top receiver. Young forced passes to him all day, held onto the ball too long to do so and was flustered by a serious Auburn pass rush because of it.
This play right here is the exact win-state for Cincinnati. Alabama facing a third-and-long, and Young airmailing a pass to a tightly covered Williams while three- or four-man pressure nearly gets home to force that bad pass. Cincinnati needs to get to Young and sack him several times, as Auburn did, too.
But putting him in spots like this is just as important as putting him on the ground. Cincinnati has to force Young to do it entirely by himself, eliminating his safety valve and daring him to go away from it. Against Auburn, with the pressure in his face, he just didn’t.
And from the looks of it, Cincinnati has the personnel to run pretty much the exact gameplan that Auburn did. It has very reliable deep-help safeties in Bryan Cook and Ja’Von Hicks, and though Gardner is going to spend the entire game on Williams, Bryant is more than capable of taking him off the motion if needed, because Cincinnati has done a bit of route passing off motion in the past.
And on top of that, like Auburn, Cincinnati can consistently supply pressure without sacrificing bodies. Myjai Sanders is one of the nation’s best pure edge rushers and Jowon Briggs is a spectacularly bizarre body type to handle, bringing pressure from the edge here as a 315-pound man.
All of this works, and it should work against what Alabama wants to bring to the table. Winning these one-on-one matchups is not easy, but it’s a whole lot easier than needing to scheme up an entire gameplan around covering weaknesses at cornerback, which Georgia tried and failed to do in the SEC title game.
The only schematic question here from Cincinnati is against that aforementioned pre-snap motion. The Bearcats did struggle a bit with it against Houston, passing players off too quickly, leaving safeties with matchups that they could not handle and giving Houston exactly what it wanted, in the form of free releases for speedy wideouts.
This just isn’t going to work here. Alabama is going to be hunting for free releases off of motion just like this, and Cincinnati’s approach has to be to trail it, as it did in the second half against Houston. That can’t be a halftime adjustment, either. It needs to be trailing from the jump, especially as Williams is concerned. If Gardner can’t track him, he needs to be passing only to Bryant, and Bryant needs to be as close to pressing him as he can.
If Cincinnati can pick that up early, be on the look out for a shallow zone drop from one of those tight linebackers to snare an interception almost identical to this one. Cincinnati forced about a million of these this season, and Young is already reckless on his glance RPO throws. If Williams is blanketed off motion on his drags and crosses, and there’s a linebacker jumping up into the lane, Young could be in for really rough day at the shop.
And that’s what Cincinnati needs here defensively. It needs to box Young in and force him into throws that he doesn't want to make. It needs to dare him to move off his first and second options in the face of line pressure, and it needs to use its elite cornerbacks to funnel those forced throws into turnover opportunities. It can be done. It has been done. Cincinnati, as simple as it sounds, just has to do it.
Unfortunately, with the Crimson Tide, that’s the hardest part.