Georgia Bulldogs HC Kirby Smart apparently playing "Battleship" with his defense is key to elite pass rush
Georgia completely annihilated the Texas Longhorns last week. Despite coming into this new SEC matchup ranked outside the top ten in the conference in pass rush pressures Georgia showed up and manhandled the Longhorns in the trenches. But how? What changed?Kirby Smart tried to downplay the pass rush success when asked about it in his […]
Georgia completely annihilated the Texas Longhorns last week. Despite coming into this new SEC matchup ranked outside the top ten in the conference in pass rush pressures Georgia showed up and manhandled the Longhorns in the trenches. But how? What changed?
Kirby Smart tried to downplay the pass rush success when asked about it in his SEC media call this week, but the truth is that Georgia introduced a whole new layer of pressure packages against Texas that they hadn't shown all year long. Especially when it came to one particular tactic involving late shifts along the defensive front for Georgia that destroyed Texas quarterbacks on a few occasions:
"Yeah, that's called stemming…You don't want to sit in one place. They may motion and move people around offensively to try to gain leverage and gain an advantage. And you know, it's like Battleship. You know, if you leave your stuff in the same spot all the time, they eventually blow you up. So we're just trying to make sure that we aren't always sitting still in the same spot."
For avid football fans who understand defensive pass rush schematics stemming isn't anything "new", but the way that Georgia executed this strategy wreaked havoc constantly. There were several examples, but the best perhaps came on the snap in the post below.
Shifting from a simple odd-front look in a 3-3-5 defense to a full-on six-man zero blitz is absolutely diabolical behavior from Kirby Smart and company. Georgia didn't always convert these kinds of late shifts into sacks, but the confusion would almost always lead to a negative play or quick incompletion.
And even when the shift wasn't incredibly late, Georgia would often add wrinkles involving dropping potential blitzing linebackers from one side of the line only to have a corner or safety blitz from the other. For example, on this Daylen Everette sack-fumble play in the post below, the confusion was evident.
The Bulldogs were playing a completely different style of defense against Texas' allegedly explosive offense, leading to over a half dozen sacks and nearly 30 pass rush pressures on the night. It obviously helped to have a couple key players back, like Warren Brinson and Mykel Williams, looking closer to fully healthy than they have in recent weeks, but "playing Battleship" moving pieces around in the pass rush was clearly the difference.
Kirby spoke to the impact of Williams and Brinson being "back", but again tried to downplay their success, suggesting the best is yet to come when they're truly 100% healthy:
"Well they're both experienced veteran players, so obviously having those guys out there helps. I still don't think Mykell [Williams] is 100%. He's playing hard for us, and he didn't play the same number of snaps he would have played if he was [100% healthy], but he's better than he was the previous two weeks, and obviously we're trying to get him back to 100% because we think it makes us tremendously different defensively. And you know, it's been a tough year with Warren [Brinson] being injured. Warren's not all the way back. He doesn't get a full practice load, but he played well on the snaps he played the other night. And a lot of that comes from experience."
Mykel Williams, despite apparently not playing at 100%, generated four pass rush pressures and snagged two sacks. Brinson tallied two pressures of his own. Once those two are fully healthy, Georgia's pass rush might become even more unstoppable. And if Kirby's defense continues adding complex wrinkles pre- and post-snap that confuse opposing offenses the Bulldogs might just win out in dominant fashion this season.
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