Greg Schiano earned the title of defensive coaching expert with his work at Miami and Rutgers in the 2000s. He built two awesome defenses in Coral Gables in 1999 and 2000, and then went home to New Jersey and used his defensive acumen to turn Rutgers into a consistently respectable Big East program.
All of that is, frankly speaking, objectively true. It’s hard to question the ability of someone that can make Rutgers anything other than terrible, especially someone who does it with defense, which is usually much more difficult to build a program around because of the typical need of elite talent to field an elite defense. Schiano’s work at Rutgers is impressive and commendable both for what he was able to accomplish and how he was able to accomplish it.
He utilized a combination of coverage schemes and pass rushing approaches in New Brunswick to make that happen. He was basically raised on 4-3, one-gap defense (which means simply that everyone in the front seven is responsible for filling a single gap), and utilized it, along with stunts up front and a lot of man coverage in the backfield to cover up for talent deficiencies.
Schiano’s defenses with the Scarlet Knights leaned into their non-prototypical build, and into their general lack of size and beat teams by overwhelming them with pressure before the ball could leave the quarterback’s hands, or before the halfback could get his eyes on the lanes opened by the offensive line. It was prone to issues against true powerhouses, but in the generally powerhouse-free Big East, it did perfectly well for Schiano and Rutgers.
That culminated with a 11-2 season in 2006 that saw Rutgers field what one can only assume (because I refuse to look it up) was the best defense in school history, allowing just 14.3 points per game on the way to No. 12 finish in the final AP Poll.
Just 10 years later, after leaving Rutgers in 2011 having accomplished just about everything he could, and after a failed stint with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Schiano took over one of the most talented defenses in the country, making his triumphant return to coaching at Ohio State under Urban Meyer.
With one of the more impressive resumes in football, Schiano was expected to serve as a perfect plug-and-play for Meyer’s Buckeyes, putting in a two-year stint in 2016 and 2017 before taking a head coaching position elsewhere. It nearly went exactly to plan. he collaborated with Luke Fickell to build a great unit in 2016, kept things rolling well in 2017 with a few minor, Oklahoma and Iowa shaped slip-ups, and then signed on to take over as the head coach at Tennessee.
You know the story from here. The Tennessee job fell through, Schiano returned for a third season at Ohio State, and ate shit so severely that Ohio State’s brand new, 39-year-old head coach sent him packing just months after calling him the classiest man in coaching.
What happened? How did everything fall apart so quickly for the one-time defensive genius? What should be expected from his return to Rutgers, which – barring the pandemic induced end of the world – will kick off this fall?
To understand what went wrong for Schiano at Ohio State, it’s important to first understand what went right for him at Rutgers that first time around, and it’s even more important to understand what was going on in college football at the time, compared to now.
Schiano’s defense at Rutgers was built from the defensive backfield up. Schiano entered the coaching world with defensive backs, so it makes sense that he wanted to rely heavily on them, and was able to do so quite a bit at Rutgers. One of the things that made the 2006 team so special was the talent in the defensive backfield, including the McCourty brothers, Devin and Jason.
With those defensive backs to lean on, Rutgers was primarily a man coverage team, trusting its cornerbacks to lock down outside receivers and asking safeties to help pick up the slack against tight ends and running backs, while using linebackers in a hybrid role. In some cases, those linebackers would play man, usually on a halfback or tight end, while the safeties dropped into a deep, 2-man zone.
In other cases, like on this interception, the linebackers dropped into a soft shell in the middle of the defense, allowing the cornerbacks and safeties to really focus on defending the perimeter, knowing that they have help across the middle.
Up front, the pressure from four rushers is good enough to force a quick pass, and that soft zone pays off with a pass right to the linebacker.
Rutgers didn’t play man coverage on every play, but usually in passing situations, it was pretty easy to assume that press man was going to be the call.
To help out with that, Rutgers also used a variety of pretty nice blitzes to pressure the quarterback in ways that he wasn’t really expecting or prepared for. The Scarlet Knights usually only brought five or six total rushers when they did blitz, but would utilize stunts and delays to overload offensive lines despite only dedicating one or two extra defenders to the rush.
Here, Rutgers actually shows off a zone blitz, dropping into a cover 3 shell in the back six and rushing five, with three defensive linemen, a linebacker and a cornerback. Louisville has a screen dialed up, but the pressure forces a pass before the blocking is there, and the cornerback dropping into his deep third is able to step back up and make a nice play.
The defense obviously wasn’t perfect against the pas, and could be beaten underneath by teams willing to play that sort of game, but in 2006, most teams simply weren’t willing to, or capable of running an offense like that.
It’s also worth noting that this defense benefited quite a bit from most teams still passing primarily from under center, meaning that the quarterback took more time to get set, survey the field and get the ball out. Those quick passes work a lot better when you can throw them, well, quickly, and that was pretty hard to do in the sort of offenses that teams were running in 2006. Rutgers was able to get more pressure with the extra seconds afforded to the defensive line, and without the threat of a ton of slants and out routes, cornerbacks were much less vulnerable playing man defense.
When defending the run, that underneath linebacker zone again played in Rutgers’ favor. With three linebackers in the box watching for the run first, the four defensive linemen have a ton of help in stopping the run, following that one-gap approach mentioned earlier. Because Rutgers was confident in its back four to make plays, but provided enough support that those defensive backs wouldn’t be left on an island, they were able to cover both the pass and the run with those linebackers. They weren’t being asked to do too much, but were still able to serve as a crucial part of both aspects of defense.
That was the defining feature of these defenses. The linebackers dictated the success of the defense, but weren’t being asked to cover massive swaths of field in the process. They played within themselves, had simple assignments, and succeeded because of it.
At Ohio State, frankly, Schiano lost track of what had worked in the first place. It almost seems to be a case of having too much talent for his own good, and being overwhelmed by the possibilities that come with blue-chip players at every position. He abandoned any usage of zone, which had been an important piece at Rutgers, and more importantly, he asked far, far too much of every single one of his players.
Schiano’s defense at Ohio State was a mishmash of schemes that were either overly complex, or schemes that just won’t work when teams are running every play out of the shotgun, with a run and pass option attached every time they snap the ball. On this play, firstly, the linebackers are too close to the line to start the play. They have no time to read and react to the run, as linebackers at Rutgers did.
Operating from that position of weakness already, those linebackers are also playing behind a defensive line that fully slants away from the play, to try to force a quarterback keep. This worked at Rutgers and isn’t a new strategy for stopping the option, but it has to be executed correctly to work. The defensive line is fine here, but the linebackers almost don’t seem to know where to go to fill the gaps left by that slant, possibly because they literally cannot see what’s going on in the backfield.
The quarterback keeps, as Ohio State wanted him too, but all three linebackers manage to fill the exact same gap, and none of them set an edge to stop the quarterback, as they’re supposed to. One-gap works against the option, but it certainly doesn’t work when you have three guys in the same gap. With the backfield in man, linebackers just can’t miss like this.
It’s the same story here. If you’re going to do one-gap, you have to… actually do it. It doesn’t work if you don’t fill all of those gaps, because the defensive backfield is too busy to help clean up for the front seven. Schiano at Rutgers likely either realizes that his linebackers can’t manage and switches to more zone, or he moves them back further and teaches them what they’re supposed to be doing, making for a much easier adjustment, even if it means fewer tackles in the backfield and more short gains on the ground.
At Ohio State, he got much too reliant on talent, and on other coaches. The best way to put it is just by saying that he got lazy, and that he forgot that his defense revolved around putting players in positions where they weren’t asked to do too much. In Columbus, his defensive backs and defensive line were asked to do everything, while the linebackers were given instructions that either weren’t clear, or weren’t delivered properly, taking them completely out of the defense.
Schiano’s defense struggled even more against the pass than it did against the run, specifically on RPOs. This, I think, is a bit more of a structural issue than it is an issue of laziness, which makes me think that Schiano needs to basically rebuild his playbook from scratch to survive in modern football.
I say that, because that one-gap system is not built for playing against offenses that are allowed to pass with linemen five yards downfield. He can complain all he wants about the rules of the RPO, but with the way that one-gap is taught to linebackers, it just isn’t salvageable in a world of RPOs. Unlike in the 2000s, linebackers have no real way of knowing whether a run or a pass is coming on those RPOs, because they can’t use the offensive line as an indicator.
Because of that, Ohio State’s linebackers were constantly abandoning the middle of the field to fill those running lanes when they saw a run block on, only for the quarterback to pull the ball and make a play like this one. Without any linebackers in the middle of the field, as they’re supposed to be on a passing play, there’s completely open space for the quarterback to throw into. The cornerbacks are doomed, because they’re left completely alone on an island with no help over the top or on the inside, because the linebackers are in the backfield and the safeties are playing man coverage.
The pressure never gets there fast enough on these sorts of plays either, which Schiano sometimes used as cover against the pass at Rutgers. The ball is just leaving the backfield too quick for pressure to get home consistently, regardless of how you bring it.
Without that help in the middle, defensive backs are screwed on the outside too, because they have no benefit of a strength elsewhere on the defense to support them. Schiano was asking safeties to play man coverage on slot receivers with no support system to the inside or over the top, because he refused to admit that one-gap wasn’t working anymore.
This is the part of the defense that I really have trouble squaring with the fact that Schiano now has a new job, at a program far less talented than Ohio State. This was broken. It doesn’t work in modern college football, and no level of coaching or talent will change that. There was a lot of problems at Ohio State that came from poor coaching, but the issues against the RPO were a matter of running a scheme that cannot be used consistently in modern college football, with basically every team running a variation of these plays. It’s a football hell designed specifically to torment Schiano’s defense.
Because of that, I just don’t know how this experiment works at Rutgers a second time. If Schiano has had a change of heart, and realizes that he needs to adapt to the times, he likely still has some good ideas. If nothing else, his players seem to like him quite a bit, despite the fact that he ruined several of their careers in his three years in Columbus.
If he hasn’t changed, however? It’s going to be very messy, very quickly, and I’m not confident that Rutgers will have the gumption or the money to get him away from the program before he causes irreparable damage to it.
Up next: The Steve Spurrier Fun N’ Gun
Graphics by Kristen Lillemoen