How Does Matt Campbell's Defense Keep Working?
The three-man front shouldn't be able to stop the run as well as it does.
If you’re going to win with defense in the modern Big 12, especially at a school trailing the majority of the conference in the talent department, you’re probably going to have to do things differently than everyone else. It took one year and three games for Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell and defensive coordinator Jon Heacock to realize that, according to a story from The Athleticin 2018.
As the story goes, Campbell and Heacock traveled to Iowa State from Toledo together, hoped to utilize their traditional 4-3 defense in the Big 12 and promptly lost nine games in their first season with the Cyclones. When 2017 started with two wins over Northern Iowa and Akron but a 44-41 loss to Iowa, Heacock and Campbell used the off-week prior to a matchup with Texas to literally throw the playbook out.
“Everything we knew, we shoved it off the desk and basically started from scratch,” Heacock told The Athletic. “I’ve been a coordinator for a long time. What we did last year was different than anything.”
Different may be an understatement, because after decades as a 4-3 coordinator, Heacock and Campbell made the switch that week towards what can be loosely described as a 3-3-5, though it’s much more fluid than the 3-3-5 defenses of old. The basic idea of the defense is that Iowa State is much more likely to find and secure commitments from good defensive backs and linebackers than it is good defensive linemen.
Because of that assumption, Iowa State’s bet was that the fewer linemen and the more hybrid players on the field, the better the defense would be.
It’s a smart bet, but it’s worth understanding why Iowa State’s talent situation is the way that it is. Without diving into at least 1,000 words on the social and economic reasoning for it, put simply, there aren’t a ton of very good linemen in Iowa State’s backyard. To find those guys, you usually have to travel into the Southeast and frankly, Iowa State can’t do that consistently enough to build a program around it. If you want a defense led by defensive linemen (think Ohio State or Clemson), you have to be bringing in four or five good defensive linemen every recruiting class, because at least two or three are going to be misses. Iowa State can’t do that every year because it can barely do it once.
That’s true of a lot of schools similar to Iowa State in geography. Kansas, Kansas State and Nebraska have all struggled in the last two decades or so with consistently bringing in top talent in the trenches. In some instances, like with Kansas, that’s completely crippled the program. Others, like Nebraska, have been able to essentially power through it enough to survive while still not understanding the deficiencies causing it so much trouble.
Then, there’s Kansas State and Iowa State. Kansas State has understood this for decades and Bill Snyder built his program around it. It’s very hard to get elite line talent to Kansas State, so Snyder didn’t try. He picked up players that he thought could contribute without starring and then found his playmakers in the back seven. Campbell and Heacock stumbled into the same concept, they’re just leaning into it even more than Snyder did by embracing a nearly position-less defense.
That brings us to the back seven and sprouts up a pretty important question: If they can’t get linemen, why can the Cyclones recruit good defensive backs and linebackers?
The best way to answer that is through Greg Eisworth. Eisworth came to Iowa State in the class of 2018 as a three-star prospect out of Trinity Valley C.C. in Athens, Texas after spending just a semester at Ole Miss, where he originally signed. Eisworth was always a talented and consistently productive player out of high school, which got him noticed by Hugh Freeze and Ole Miss, but he was almost forgotten once he took the JuCo route.
Iowa State kept tabs on him, took a flyer and now, entering his third and final season in the program, Eisworth has developed into the key for this whole defense and the template for Iowa State’s search for playmakers. Iowa State may not have a built-in recruiting footprint for guys straight out of high school, but because the Cyclones are in the JuCo valley in the middle of the country, players like Eisworth are always going to be close by and available for Iowa State to pluck out from under the bigger Big 12 schools that don’t have much interest in JuCo guys. You can’t find elite defensive linemen doing this, but the JuCo ranks are going to produce high-level skill position players just about every year as long as you know where to find them. Campbell does.
In building a defense around guys like that, Iowa State has created a unit that plays with a ton of flexibility and a massive chip on its shoulder.
Flexibility is the name of the game for this defense and a big part of why it works as well as it does. As I said, it’s a 3-3-5 in name, but not in appearance. Iowa State’s fifth defensive back is not a slot corner or a third true safety, but more of a hybrid safety/cornerback that floats around the field as needed. Iowa State’s terminology identifies this role as the “star” position and Eisworth has made it his own in recent seasons.
The star serves as the connecting tissue between the front six and the back five of the defense. Iowa State bucks the norm a bit by keeping three linebackers on the field on most plays, but loves to flex those linebackers way out of the traditional box to give the defense a bit more ground coverage when it plays zone. This is a defense that does a lot of cover 2 and a lot of cover 4, meaning that those outside linebackers are asked to cover the intermediate perimeter on a decent percentage of pass defense reps. Starting them out closer to where their zone requirements are makes things a little bit easier and allows them to watch the play from the snap to track the quarterback’s eyes.
Behind the linebackers, Eisworth looks to move around wherever he’s needed and works in basically any role. He does a little bit of man, a little bit of zone and serves essentially as a linebacker on running plays. When he lines up as an in-between, under the safeties but behind the middle linebacker, it allows Iowa State to get creative with the front three, use the middle linebacker as a bludgeon up the middle while still having a more traditional run reading “linebacker” behind him in Eisworth.
That’s what’s happening here. The security of the star behind the linebackers against the run helps Iowa State stunt and twist the front three to screw with blocking rules for the line, while giving offenses the illusion of an empty box. The star is basically playing the same role here that a flex defender would back in the 90s, just much further back to give him more time to read whatever the offense is doing.
On this play, Iowa State actually keeps those linebackers in because it’s a pretty obvious rushing situation, but Eisworth is still back in the safety spot looking to stop the run first as a linebacker would, while one of the inside linebackers is basically just rushing as a lineman would.
The interior rush gets home before Eisworth or one of the other linebackers has the chance to make a play, but you can see him surveying behind the first two levels of the defense and looking to get outside to set an edge if the halfback decides to head for the perimeter.
Against the pass, the flexibility that Iowa State has with its linebackers and that star position allow it to cover basically every spot on the field. With Eisworth in as that hybrid player, Iowa State is able to drop into a cover 4 while still keeping a defensive back (safety Lawrence White, No. 11) in the under shell, rushing just three and using a linebacker as a spy on Sam Ehlinger at the line of scrimmage.
This result is the basic goal of the defense. Because Iowa State has the personnel to drop eight defenders on any play, it’s pretty much always going to be difficult to pass the ball on this defense. The undermanned front and five-or-six-man box dares the offense to give up on the passing game and just run, which is where the three linebackers and the star position can really shine. Because the defense swarms to the ball so quickly, running into it is basically football’s version of fool’s gold.
With one just five box defenders at the start of the play, Texas assumes that a quarterback run should be able to create a serious numbers advantage with a six-on-five matchup when you include the halfback as a blocker. However, because the defensive line has so many slants and bizarre rush approaches, the entire offensive line is caught up in just three guys, leaving a linebacker and Eisworth unblocked with just the halfback left to take them on. That three-man front looks a lot weaker than it actually is and that’s really the basis of the whole defense. Iowa State presents strength in its numbers dedicated to the passing game, but the stunts and techniques of the defensive line are able to cause a ton of trouble for offensive linemen. With at least one run stuffing linebacker behind them and then another player patrolling the middle of the field behind him, Iowa State is able to get a lot more creative and aggressive with this front than most traditional 3-3-5 defenses.
When you back that up with a flexible defense filled with eight guys that can play each other’s positions, it creates one of the better solutions for stopping Big 12 offenses that have gashed more traditional defenses for years. It isn’t perfect (though it would work very well with a team that has more talent), but given what Iowa State has, it’s just about the best possible fit for the program and could serve as a great foundational block for building up the program moving forward.