Hints of the 46, as the season begins.

Keith Goldner is active this season both on Advanced NFL Stats and his own blog, Drive By Football. As he has updated his Markov Chain model (see also here), I’d suggest finding Keith’s new articles on either of these two sites. In my opinion, Keith’s work on his expected points models is a must read for anyone who wants to learn analytics, because he’s perhaps the best at making sure that readers can understand how he sets his models up.

Jene Bramel is a good follow if you like in game analysis on Twitter. After the Cowboys 24-17 victory over the Giants, this tweet caught my eye, where Jene mentions a Bear front.

A Bear you say?

I never found that Bear, but at 5:18 in the second quarter – one of the more interesting drives in the game, from the standpoint of a defensive front junkie – we see this:

Two down linemen, but six players at line depth and two at linebacker depth give this front a Bear like feel.

Diagrammatic representation of the front at 5:18, 2nd qtr. Bruce Carter is the linebacker between T and TE.

Though this is formally a nickel front, and there really isn’t a 3-0-3 diamond here, there are a couple things of note. There are six players across the line. Bruce Carter is in the gap between the RDE and the R (rush linebacker), just inside the tight end. Sean Lee is at the 50 behind Bruce (a few yards in front of the left offensive tackle), and another player is in the other 50, a few yards in front of the right offensive tackle. The “lineman” in the two point stace, to the left of the nose guard in this view, isn’t playing a 5 technique as much as he is playing a 3, and the whole front looks as if Rob Ryan is guessing a run to the left side of the line.

That’s exactly what happened. The Giants ran left. Bruce Carter defeated his block and the run gained almost nothing. And it’s almost pure stubbornness to run a running back into the heart of this kind of formation.

Otherwise, I saw plenty of 2 and 3 man fronts, and at one point, perhaps a 4 man front.

After the game, I found that the day of the game, Chase Stuart had this article online, comparing the relative skills of Eli Manning and Tony Romo. And no, it isn’t the usual media fawning exercise.

Update: for more Rob Ryan fronts, this thread has screen shots of the first 10 Ryan fronts of the season.

 

Rex and Rob Ryan: Loaded for Bear

Both Rex and Rob Ryan are known to use the Bear front, otherwise known as the double eagle, and in its 1985 incarnation, the 46, and  in preseason week 1 year 2011, both brothers flashed some double eagle with 8 man line.

The image above is the most famous Bear of the night, as Jon Gruden mentioned it, but  the very next play featured a Bear with a flexed nose tackle.

Rob’s double eagle had 5 down linemen instead of 6, but the 6 players along the line, and two players at linebacker depth and over the tackle leads me to designate this the first Bear the Cowboys have run under Rob Ryan.

 

“Coaching Football’s Double Eagle Flex Defense”, by Ted Amorosi – a review

It’s a short book, very much an outline as much as it is anything, and that is both this book’s blessing and curse. It’s a blessing because it’s packed with ideas, and it’s something of a curse in that the details of implementation are often left up to the reader. For the fan, it’s perhaps an easier read than Ron Vanderlinden’s tome, and so I think much more suitable for the curious but casual fan of defensive technique.

For those who aren’t familiar with the double eagle flex, it’s worthwhile noting  that this is an 8 in the box defense closely related to the 46 employed by the Ryan family. There are 5 men along the line, including one flexed 3 technique tackle. The strong safety, or rover, is a hybrid player, and I’ve depicted him below as a linebacker. But much like many run oriented modern defenses, this player has to both play linebacker technique and also defend the pass.

It wouldn’t be a recent review on “Code and Football” if we didn’t provide the reader with a diagram, so this is my representation of the Double Eagle versus the Ace formation, three wide.

Ace formation versus double eagle flex. High School field. DBs funnel receivers into FS.

Note that both the boundary corner and the rover are supposed to funnel their men into the free safety.

The book is 98 pages long, packed with shifts, mods, stunts, all described in that  brief synoptic style.

 

Three different 34 fronts, etc.

From  the blog “Compete in All Things” comes  this nice little quote:

 The 3-4 has a lot of moving parts, more so than just about any other defense, and often has changing responsibilities with regards to force, contain, spill, all those terms we love to use to define good defense….

Huh?

    The 3-4 is a seven man front to start. The actual front alignment varies quite a bit, with some teams preferring a 4-0-4 head up approach with slanting and stunting, and others preferring an ‘under’ front variation (9-5-1-3-5), and yet others running a 3-0-3 double eagle front

which, because I just think it’s cool, I’m going to illustrate:

3 different 34 fronts. The base front is on top, an over shifted front in the middle, and the double eagle front obtained by "Eagling" the DEs and ILBs (i.e. having them swap facing linemen) is on the bottom.

This dovetails  in with another neat quote, this time from Coach Huey’s board, on a thread devoted to what an Eagle defense is.

 ”eagling” was often used to describe either the Okie tackle going in over the guard and the LB going out over the tackle, or in the 4-3 the end going out over the TE or over a ghost TE, and the OLB going in over the tackle…

To note as well, for all you 46 aficionados out there, Coach Huey has a seven nine page discussion of the 46 that’s been going on for almost four years now.

 

Drawing a good diagram of a football field, part 3. Adding a defense.

This is the  third of a series on drawing football diagrams, and this time we’ll be talking about drawing the defensive side of the ball. For now, we’re going to have the offense going “up” the image and the defense going “down” the image. It’s easy enough to invert. Draw the offense the way we show in Part 2, rotate the result by 180 degrees, and then add your defensive players. In the old days, the defense was indicated with triangles. Most football bloggers, however, like to use fonts with names on them for the defense. The problem with fonts is that fonts are often tied to an operating system, so using them well requires some familiarity with font families. A good introduction to font families is here. And to note, Helvetica is installed as part of Image Magick, so if you want a no nonsense solution that should just work, set your font to “Helvetica-Bold”.

Since we are using Image Magick to generate our graphics, we can add color at will to our diagrams, and so one convention we’re going to follow for now is to use shape and color to distinguish offense from defense. offenses will be in white, defenses in yellow. Other conventions we could use are:

• Using different shapes for linemen, linebackers, and defensive backs.
• Tilting the defensive symbol to indicate a slanted lineman.
• Shading the offensive lineman to indicate a shaded orientation on the  part of the defensive player.

For now, we’re going to use this image as the basis for our defenses. We’ve spoken about the Desert Swarm, a kind of double eagle defense, here.

Arizona versus Washington, 1992. I formation versus Desert Swarm. Whip (flex tackle) on TE side of formation..

And these are our attempts to duplicate that photograph. Obviously one corner and the free safety position are a product of speculation.

Defense in yellow, using symbols. Slant lineman denoted by tilt of triangles.

This graphic is a text based representation of the defense.

Helvetica-Bold is the font used here.

The images as displayed above are about 3/4 their actual size, so double click on them to see a full sized image (unless you’re using Chrome, in which case you’ll get a huge image).

Font notes:

To list the fonts that Image Magick can use by name, use the command (Win32/64 cmd window or Unix shell):

convert -list font | more

fonts that are not listed here can be accessed by direct path to the font file itself. In Ubuntu/Linux, the Fontmatrix utility can be a big help in seeing which fonts are good and determining the font path.

In this article, the example code is going to be given in Perl, using the Image::Magick module.

Code samples:

• Football field in Perl
• Offense code
• Desert Swarm symbolic
• Desert Swarm text based

Previous parts of this article:

• Part One
• Part Two

 

When your boys aren’t big enough: Using the 46 to stop larger teams

This is a short shout out to a nice little article on a new blog I’ve found, called “Football is Life“. In it a high school football coach talks about using a 4-2 base defense and getting run over by larger, run oriented squads. He then teaches his squad the 46, and in this article, talks about the position responsibilities in getting a nickel squad to play 46 style football. It’s a clever read, and for a 46 aficionado, worth your time and attention.

 

NFL’s Greatest Games: 1985 Chicago Bears

This DVD set has just arrived, and as my DVD player is in the shop, it’s not the easiest thing to review. Thankfully, most computers these days have DVD players.

There are 12 games in the 1985 season on the set. The disks themselves are housed in  6 thinpacks and those thinpacks are fragile. I have bits of teeth falling out every time I open up a new DVD.

 

The defensive fronts of Rob Ryan

After looking at the film highlights available for the Cleveland Browns in 2010, you can see that Rob Ryan uses a broad array of defensive fronts, depending on down and distance. In short yardage, Rob will use traditional goal line defenses, but also the 46 front. Whether he’s using a “pure 46″ or a newer “zone 46” is anyone’s guess, but the front itself is unmistakable.

He uses a lot of traditional 3 and 4 man fronts, but he also uses nickel fronts ( 2-4) and psycho fronts (1-5) and also “cloud” schemes (no down linemen). Nickel fronts arise when, from the 3-4 you replace a defensive end with a rush linebacker. Psycho fronts happen when both defensive ends in a 3-4 are replaced with a rush linebacker. You can also go from a 4 man front to a nickel front by replacing both defensive ends with rush linebackers. I’ve seen substitutions that look like 4-3 over and under defenses where the weak side DE has been replaced with a rush linebacker. These end up appearing as if they are very shifted 3-4 fronts.

In this particular capture, the looping rusher ends up outside the rush linebacker facing the opposition LT.

This is a psycho front versus Cinncinnati

And this a particularly good shot of a nickel front versus Tampa Bay.

The two man line is in particularly heavy use versus New Orleans, so I strongly recommend perusing the highlights of that game.

Related Articles:

• Rob Ryan, Cleveland versus Pittsburgh, 2009
• Sons of the 46: Double Eagle Defenses, then and now.
• The defensive fronts of Dom Capers

 

“The Games That Changed the Game” on the 46

In a previous blog article, we reviewed this book. But in terms of those of us who are 46 wonks, it has a lot more to say in the rich set of interviews provided for the fan. We’re going to explore those comments a little deeper in this second, companion blog article to the first.

The first point to make is that the text in this article is quite good. Jaws accurately describes how the Bears lined up in the 46 on page 161 of the Ballantine hardback. The diagram, however, on page 169 leaves a lot to be desired. Well, it’s simply wrong.

In comparison, we’ll show you the first page in Rex’s book, which is correct.

If you’re using this blog as a 46 reference, this won’t come as a surprise to you, but the mismatch between text and diagram is disorienting. On  this page,  however, is a critical passage.

Let’s be clear though: The 46 could not be an every-down defense. The better NFL offenses could still make big plays if it was used too much, so its risk-versus-reward ratio was deemed too detrimental for Chicago to run it for an entire game. But Buddy dialed it up frequently enough (often 30 to 35 percent and sometimes more) to keep quarterbacks guessing.

The defense, in other words, was one of many in Ryan’s pocket. The point ultimately, Jaws and his interviewees argue, was confusion.

Another critical passage, is the effect of modern spread formations on the effectiveness of the “pure 46″. We’ll quote Doug Plank this time:

The tightly packed eight man fronts from our day just can’t succeed as a base defense against spread formations. Offensive coordinators came to the conclusion fairly quickly that unless they spread defenses out, their quarterbacks were going to get hit again and again. That isn’t acceptable today…

Jeff Fisher’s role – this will be difficult to quote and be accurate, because this book uses the phrase 46 to both mean the defense and the philosophy behind the defense – in the  evolution of  46 style defenses is described in a Brian Billick quote as follows:

Fisher was the first to adapt it to the modern game. He came up with zone concepts that appeared to give the same look as the original 46 – but weren’t – and that created a new set of problems for offenses.

Of the people truest to the principles of the 46, the authors of this book point to the late Jimmy Johnson, the defensive coordinator of the Philadelphia Eagles.

 

A 46 defense video breakdown

I’m tying together data from a series of older forum posts, breaking down video of the eighth game of the 1985 season, a game between the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings.