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.

 

Technical geekery, Fritz Shurmer’s Eagle, and the beginning of the 2012 NFL season

It’s amazing how small things can lead to upgrades, expensive or otherwise. I discovered media streaming to televisions over the summer, via the product ps3mediaserver, and that led to an interest in things like mplayer, ffmpeg, and avidemux. The demands of programs like that led to a motherboard upgrade, so now I have a 8 core AMD processor and 16 Gb of memory on my main desktop. Since 32 bit operating systems cannot address more than 4 GB at a time (though interestingly, the modern 32 bit pae kernels can handle 16 Gb of memory via paging tricks), I upgraded my main machine to Ubuntu 12.04, 64 bit.

Some notes: for those of you following my work technically, I’ll note that Maggie Xiong’s PDL::Stats does not like the version of PDL installed by Ubuntu 12.04 – that PDL is buggy – and CPAN does a poor job of trying to install PDL. It is best is to download the PDL module separately from CPAN and manually compile it. For one, you’re bound to find things you forgot to install and those extras will help give you a working product. Afterwards, you can compile PDL::Stats just fine.

John Turney, of the Pro Football Researcher’s Association, writes the blog about this article:

Shurmur ran an Eagle defense with the LA Rams and it was a double eagle defense, with 2 3-techs over the guards and a noseguard who was a linebacker by trade. The Eagle defense of Shurmur was very similar or identical to the 46.

Shumur’s book makes it clear, Eagle: The 5 LBer defense.

The only difference was in the personnel used. He used a linebacker in the place of the nose tackle and the defense ends. That allowed him to move that nose linebacker around if he wanted to and stem that guy to a standup linebacker and a variant of the Eagle called “Hawk”.

Shurmur did use a 3-4 as a base defense for Rams from 1983-90, but the Eagle was a sub defense they used for several reasons more often in 1988-90 than in 1985-87. In base situations with the Rams they were a 3-4 team. When the Eagle happened they’d pull the nose tackle Alvin Wright and LDE Doug Reed, and bring in extra linebackers to fill the spots in the Eagle.

So, the Eagle was an “eagle” and Shumur addresses this in his book. It was based on the Greasy Neale defense as well as the Buddy Ryan defense.

Thank you, John, for the correction. And for those of us who follow the Duece on Twitter, he tweeted an article from Strong Football about the Shurmer 5 LB defense, that pretty much lays out what John said above. That article is highly recommended. To borrow a diagram from that article, there is a position called nose backer, and he can be roughly where the Will backer is in a classic 4-3, or he can step into the line and function as a lightweight nose tackle.

Nose backer in the line, in the Eagle variant of the Shurmer 5 LB defense. Diagram originally from the Strong Football article referenced above.

Pretty cool, huh? At this point, I’d have to say that the Strong Football article is a must read for those of us interested in Eagle variants.

Stepping back to the beginning of preseason, there are at least two teams in the NFC East with lingering offensive line issues. I don’t have much insight presently into the state of the Giants or Redskins lines (feel free to speak up if you do), but you can see a fair amount of tweets and articles involving Philadelphia Eagle left tackle Demetress Bell. With the Cowboys, everyone who was considered a solution at guard (here, here, and here) and center, as of a couple months ago, is now injured. Guard has become something of a revolving door, and there is now talk of bringing in a veteran center, as Phil Costa is also injured.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Sons of the 46 – double eagle defenses, then and now

As John Reed points out , the phrase “Eagle” is abused, inconsistent, and overused. And even though Earle Neale’s “Eagle” defense is celebrated, it’s hard to know exactly what it is. Jene Bramel’s excellent series on pro defenses shows something akin to a 5-2-4 Oklahoma (father of the modern 34), but the diagram of Neale’s Eagle defense in Ryan and Walker’s 46 book (page 10) looks something more like this:

According to Ryan and Walker, Earle Neale's Eagle looked something like this.

This latter diagram is more believable, since people do claim that dropping the nose guard in Earle’s defense led to a kind of 4-3 (Or in Steve Belichick’s notation of the time, a 45 – back in the 1950s, corners would be sometimes be counted as linebacker depth players).

The three players in the middle – the diamond – are a 0 technique nose tackle, and two 3 technique tackles. The 3 technique tackles can also be called eagles – terminology used in odd front 4-3s and also certain derivatives of the 46. These sons of the 46 are often called double eagle defenses because of the 46 “diamond“, which they inherit from Buddy Ryan’s defense.

The most important of these defenses is called the Desert Swarm defense, made famous by Dick Tomey during his period as Arizona’s head coach. This defense lives on in college through the work of Rich Ellerson, currently the head coach at Army, who was a defensive staffer during Tomey’s run at Arizona. Though a number of sources call this defense a 4-3, it’s more an 8 in the box defense of the Ryan family, with the strong safety playing more of a linebacker technique, and the alignment to me looking quite a bit like a 5-3. To note, in the Desert Swarm, one of the 3 techniques (usually the weak side tackle) is a flexed tackle. Ironically, in the photo below, the flex tackle is on the strong side of the formation.

Literature on this defense is a little hard to come by. Some links that you might find useful are given below.

• Excellent summary PDF on the Arizona Desert Swarm defense
• 5A Texas football on Arizona’s Desert Swarm
• Coach Huey on the Desert Swarm
• Coach Huey on the double eagle. Nice ASCII diagrams.
• SI on the Colorado State-Arizona game (quotes from Ted Bruschi).
• RC Online on Army and its Desert Swarm implementation.
• John Reed’s Football Dictionary. Funny and pointed.

To summarize: a double eagle defense is one with a nose guard and 2 3 technique tackles. A double eagle flex has one flexed tackle. A double eagle double flex has two flexed tackles. Earle Neale’s Eagle appears to be a double eagle, though no one is 100% certain. These defenses should not be confused with the 34 Eagle of Fritz Schurmer, which is an eagle of an entirely different color.

Update: a more nuanced look at Fritz Schurmer’s Eagle can be found here.

 

Dom Capers Defensive Fronts: Green Bay versus NYJ, 2010.

You would think that when Dom Capers and Rex Ryan clash, and play in a 9-0 defensive slugfest, that the NFL network could find interesting film for both coaches. In this particular game, they largely showed highlights of the frustrations of the Jets offense. No matter, Dom Capers can make very subtle changes to very ordinary looking defenses. This shot for example: looks like a 3 man front on first glance. But is it that? For that matter, is  it even a psycho (1 man in 3 point stance) or just a very well disguised cloud?

This is typical of the fronts you can find throughout the video of this contest. This nickel front is very ordinary by Dom’s standards.

This front, I’m hard pressed to classify. Look at the defensive line splits; almost purely geared for an outside pass rush.

We’ll end with this one, a far more standard psycho front.

For those less familiar with the various kinds of modern fronts, I can suggest this article on Rob Ryan from this blog, and perhaps checking out the very excellent Blitzology sometime.

 

The defensive fronts of Rob Ryan: Cleveland vs Pittsburgh 2009

On a wet April weekend, what better way to spend some time than looking for an exotic football front? And in this, Rob Ryan seldom disappoints.

We’ll be looking at some Rob Ryan fronts that can be found on NFL.com video  of the week 14 game between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, 2009. This is when Cleveland began a 4-0 tear to end the season.

I’ve seen Rob Ryan stand up the defensive ends in what initially looks like a 4 man front but not the tackles, until now:

And in this front, you see a 2-4 nickel front, looking a bit like a 3-4 with the LDE of a 3-4 having been replaced with an extra defensive back.

And what would a Rob Ryan survey be without a couple shots of no down lineman (cloud) defenses?

 

Pittsburgh-Atlanta 2010, two defensive fronts

This is a defensive front from the Pittsburgh-Atlanta game. Look at it for 2 seconds. Is it a 46 or not?

So what is it?

It’s easy to confuse until you see the DB lined up over the slot receiver. The linemen  aren’t spaced the way a 46 would be, but.. I suspect you can get a 46 effect out of a 34 front by pinching the ends into the offensive guards.

I spent a lot of time looking at other teams and wasting that time. No fronts of interest to speak of. Now, Pittsburgh tends to show a lot of 34 looks, but there is so much motion in  their linebackers that  they tend to keep someone like me engaged. For example, what’s happening here?

Some things to note: the front is shifted to the weak side of the formation. LDE is over the guard,  the NT appears to be in the “A” gap, and the RDE is outside the LT.  The result was that Matt Ryan ended up being intercepted by Troy Polamalu.

 

Defensive fronts of the New York Giants

This is a brief survey of the NFL.com video highlights of the October 3 game, New York Giants versus the Chicago Bears, in the 2010 season. This is a  game where the vaunted Giants pass rush netted 10 sacks. Both New York and Chicago have distinct preferences for the classic 4 man line, though they’ll add their own unique twists to it, such as linebacker shifts, putting 8 men along the front, blitzing defensive backs, and playing with end and tackle spacing to take advantage of matchups.

A lot of this material is best seen in motion, such as Aaron Ross’s cornerback blitz and sack of Jay Cutler, or Barry Cofield’s really fine inside rush for a sack, from the LDT spot. But a couple things we’ll highlight.

There is a nice sequence where a strong side safety creeps up to a linebacker-esque position, eventually looking like a 4-4.

And  in this screen capture, 1 defensive back and 1 linebacker slipping between the 4 down linemen, giving a pretty clear “A gap” blitz threat (and yes, they did blitz). The original front, just counting players with 50something numbers, appears to have been a 4-1 dime.

Compare the look above to chapter 20 in Tim Layden’s book.

 

Mo Better Nickel Fronts

It’s the 17th week of the 2010 season and it’s in the waning moments of the first quarter. Eli Manning looks over the field and the Redskins flash a nickel front. In this case it’s a 2-3. Brian Orapko, usually a right side rush linebacker, is this time on the left side. As there is no strong side to the offensive formation, he’s a free rusher regardless the side he comes from. The two down linemen are found in the “B gap”. 4 players end up rushing, betraying  the similarity between this front and a classic 4 man line.

The result? Tipped pass for an interception.  Some better looks at  the Skin’s 2-3 front can be found here (ironically in the draft thread on Extreme Skins). For video highlights of  the game, check this out.