DotComp: Measuring this sample against Oregon
Jim Comparoni
SpartanMag.com Publisher
Talk about it in The Underground Bunker
KALAMAZOO - Okay, let's be honest. At the conclusion of Friday night's game, we asked ourselves: Based on MSU's uneven 37-24 victory at Western Michigan, do we now feel MSU has a better chance to beat Oregon, or a worse chance?
First of all, the Oregon we have in mind is last year's Oregon. We should table all thoughts about Oregon until we actually see the 2015 Ducks play against an FBS opponent (which they won't until they visit Spartan Stadium next week).
Regardless of whether Oregon's new quarterback, Vernon Adams, is even remotely comparable to 2014 Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota, we can be sure about this: Oregon will have speed at wide receiver. They'll play fast, try to get you tired, make you sub-in some second-string DBs, and then test you with more speed.
I had concerns about MSU's ability to handle high-end speed at wide out prior to Friday's game. Now, those concerns are more well-founded.
That doesn't mean the MSU secondary and the defense as a whole can't be ultimately successful. It's just going to make it trickier, with tighter margin for error.
We knew the Broncos - with the best passing attack in the Mid-America Conference, led by true NFL prospect split end Corey Davis - were going to give the Spartans' new cornerbacks a major college test on opening night. He did, and MSU passed most of the tests, but I come away a bit concerned about the top-end speed of junior cornerback Demetrious Cox, and MSU's other options at the position.
I really like Cox as a player. And he is doing what he can to help this team by playing cornerback. But let's get this straight: MSU has three very good safeties on this team, and one cornerback that I'm currently comfortable with (Vayante Copeland).
Cox is one of the three quality safeties, along with Montae Nicholson and RJ Williamson. Cox is undoubtedly one of the four best DBs on this team. So he needs to be on the field. He is the safety best-suited to move to cornerback, as the Spartans search for answers at that position. He has made the transition to corner, and he looks pretty good in some aspects, very good in other aspects, but when Davis ran past him on a deep go route on Friday night, it might have revealed a little bit about the ceiling of this Spartan defense. And it's a ceiling that the very best offenses and wide receivers might exploit in difference-making situations this season.
Know this: Davis is a terrific receiver. "He's going to get drafted," Michigan State co-defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach Harlon Barnett said outside the locker room following Friday's game, on his way to meet family members and board the team bus.
Cox did a good job of muscling him on some plays. On the deep go route, Cox worked the route properly, turned his hips well, funneled Davis to the outside, and he ran with Davis initially. But then Davis hit another gear and Cox couldn't quite match it. With Davis, once he was even with Cox, he was leavin', as they say.
Davis didn't finish the play, didn't come up with the catch. But the example remains on film. Others will continue to test Cox, the way they tested Darian Hicks last year. The thing Cox has that Hicks didn't have is physical strength at the line of scrimmage. That will help.
Getting beat deep by Davis was no huge sin for Cox. We've seen the great Trae Waynes allow a receiver to run past him from time to time (see the first quarter of the 2014 Rose Bowl).
Cox's top-end speed is something we had to wonder about because we quite frankly haven't seen him play the position (other than a few snaps in the Cotton Bowl), due to practices being closed.
I'm hesitant to arrive at absolutes based on just one game. But it's hard to improve one's top-end speed during the course of a season. I'm not ready to say Cox's speed is a problem. Not at all. He will have plenty of juice against most opponents, on most plays. But we can be sure that Oregon will test him next week. And it might take only one or two failed tests to swing the balance of a game, when you're trying to play for a National Championship.
This is the good thing about Cox: He has excellent size and physicality at the line of scrimmage. He's a team-oriented guy, playing for arguably the best defensive backs coaches in America. He's well-schooled in the fundamentals, and does a good job of taking away inside routes while moving his feet and hips quickly enough to stay in phase.
This skill and physical ability made him an excellent player last night in the red zone. He pressed Davis several times in the red zone, controlled the route, influenced where the passing window would be, and then closed on that window with smarts and physicality. Western Michigan tried to beat him, and Copeland, with fade routes in the red zone, and failed.
Cox's ability to play strong in the red zone is a major, major plus.
Settle It In The Red Zone
Being able to win in red zone is becoming a difference-making component in today's college football. "It's pretty much all about finishing in the red zone today, wouldn't you agree?" said Mississippi State head coach Dan Mullen last January while watching the National Championship Game with other coaches as part of an ESPNU live studio program.
I thought Mullen's quote, and his colleagues' agreement, was fascinating. And I'm not going to argue with him. Learn from him.
The fast, ball-setting rules combined with the uptempo spreads of today's college football have made it harder to stop quality offenses between the 20-yard lines than ever before. Scoring and rushing yardage have escalated, nationally, in recent years, thanks in part to uptempo spread offenses.
Against the best offenses, a Top 10 defense can give up 500 yards and 30-plus points and come out of it feeling it has played well enough to win.
Michigan State has arrived at the philosophy that the answer against the best, uptempo spread teams (such as Oregon) is to stop the run, make a team one-dimensional with the pass, contain those passes between the 20-yard lines by tackling well in space and preventing the big play. And if said offense is proficient enough to get inside your 25-yard line, then stop them there once you're able to squeeze routes a little tighter due to the safeties and slot-area linebacker being able to play in closer quarters as the field shrinks.
Believe it or not, this strategy might have worked just fine against the best offense in the country last year - Baylor. But that game remains a nightmare of sorts for Spartan fans, despite the historic victory. Seeing the Bears throw for 600-plus yards makes some wonder what the heck MSU was doing in pass coverage on that day. Seeing Western Michigan chuck it around for 365 on Friday night reawakens some of those concerns, especially with Waynes having left for the NFL.
The chief problem for MSU in the litmus test against Baylor wasn't the fact that Baylor completed an absurd number of short routes to the free-release slot area, but that the Bears scored
three touchdowns from outside the red zone. MSU felt it was on schedule, defensively, in allowing the short-area, slot stuff while shutting down the run.
MSU planned to stop Baylor in the red zone, and did so on four occasions. MSU forced four Baylor field goals. No one forces Baylor to attempt that many field goals.
But Baylor wrecked MSU's ideas by scoring three times from outside the red zone. (One TD coming on a double-pass trick play, and another when Cox and Williamson miscommunicated on how to squeeze a cover-three seam.) (Baylor punched in a 19-yard TD pass on a trick play to an offensive lineman. Western Michigan went to a similar wrinkle trick of sorts in sneaking an h-back past linebacker Darien Harris for a 29-yard TD.)
Why am I talking about the Baylor game? Because Baylor - along with Ohio State and Oregon - represent the state of the art in college offenses. And Baylor is the most recent state-of-the-art offense that MSU has played. Oregon will be the next. MSU is in the conversation as a National Championship contender. Beating Oregon next week will allow MSU to stay in that conversation.
Some of MSU's theories worked against Baylor. Some didn't. Meanwhile, Western Michigan succeeded in probing some of the soft areas of MSU's zone defense that were also compromised by Baylor.
Was MSU's pass defense exposed by this MAC opponent on Friday night? I wouldn't go that far. Again, I'm cautious about arriving at absolutes.
It was uncomfortable for Spartan fans to watch Western Michigan slot receiver Daniel Braverman scurry around for 13 catches and 109 yards on Friday.
In the SPARTAN Plus Pre-Snap Read, we predicted that Braverman would be a bigger problem than Davis. It's unclear whether that turned out to be true, but the point is that the mixture of WMU's system, along with Braverman's talent and the soft spots in the Spartans' base zone coverage, led us to conclude that the ball was going to get fed to Braverman. MSU knew it, and tried to limit his yards after the catch, while hoping to dish out some hard hit. As it turned out, MSU didn't get than many hard hits on him. That kid is good.
The WMU quarterback was on-time and on-the-money, and Braverman finished all but one of his opportunities (failing to haul in a deep wheel route against Harris, on a well-conceived trick play. On that play, WMU faked a bubble screen to Braverman, then sprung him down the sideline on a the wheel after the bubble action sucked the play-side safety away from helping. This ploy matched Braverman's speed on Harris, giving Braverman the one-step edge in knowing where the play was headed.)
That wheel route wrinkle, and the sneak route to the H-back (and Baylor's TD pass to the offensive lineman) represent the answer to the answer for offenses. If a quality defense such as MSU is going to play bend-but-don't-break and then try to stop you in the red zone, the answer for some offenses is becoming to run trick plays in the red zone, or at the edge of the red zone. Save your trick plays for the edge of the red zone. That's a novel concept. WMU did it on Friday night, and they were smart to do it, because Cox and Copeland were good in the red zone, and Braverman's effectiveness diminishes as the offense gets closer to the goal line.
So why was Braverman so open all the time? That's just the way MSU plays it. Every coverage as a weakness, as Dantonio likes to say. MSU elects to be soft in the slot area. MSU wants to press the corners, play the safeties shallow, and have the slot-area LB (Harris) leaning more to help stop the run than most 4-2-5 defenses might do these days.
Making sure to stop the run leaves MSU a little more vulnerable to short-area curls and some intermediate benders. MSU is willing to make that trade, between the 20s.
Braverman, with his excellent ability to read defenses, and run tight routes, continually sat down in weak spots in the zone. WMU quarterback Zach Terrell, was excellent in anticipating the openings, delivering the ball on-time and on-target, and doing so without telegraphing passes. Dantonio was most impressed with his ability to remain efficient despite getting rocked by seven sacks, and several other hurries and knockdowns.
Some Numbers To Consider
Western Michigan amassed 365 yards on 50 pass attempts.
When including the seven sacks, WMU netted just 326 yards of passing on 57 attempts. That's an average of 5.7 yards per pass attempt. That average would lead the Big Ten in that category, most years.
The 365 yards might seem extreme. But when wrapped within the overall construct, combined with allowing just 18 yards of rushing, and making the Broncos one-dimensional on offense, MSU's pass defense might not have been as substandard as one may think.
Will MSU mix up its coverages a bit more against Oregon, and change the pictures of its soft spots for the new Ducks QB? Changing coverages hasn't been MSU's mode of operation in the past, and that philosophy has served them well.
However, Oregon's run game will be much harder to stop than WMU's. We may see Oregon return to the QB keeper in the spread option being more of a facet to its offense than it was last year, when the Ducks were trying to protect Mariota.
WMU did some good things on offense, but the Broncos don't have nearly the run-pass conflict component that the Ducks will present.
But MSU will play more players than last year, try to stay fresh, try to contain the ground game, try to limit big plays by tackling in space, and stop Oregon in the red zone. In the meantime, there is no margin for error at cornerback. Can't get beat deep. That's where Cox will need to answer.
And so will the other corners.
Copeland was pretty good most of the night. He gave up a route or two to Davis on some fine angle routes. But for the most part, he was excellent for a freshman playing in his first game.
Second-stringers Arjen Colquhoun and Jermaine Edmondson were each beaten on significant plays, in limited playing time. That wasn't a positive.
Overall, MSU's individuals in the secondary didn't get beat much. I counted three or four times in 57 pass attempts. The other completions were structural, not individual beatings. And it's a structure MSU may tweak here and there, but is unlikely to change. And I don't blame them.
"I thought they played pretty well," Dantonio said of the cornerbacks. "I would say they are solid right now. But it's a game-to-game thing.
"We made some mistakes that have got to be cleaned up, but that happens in the first game."
How confident is Dantonio that those mistakes will get corrected?
"Very confident," Dantonio said. "We've got good players. We have players playing for the first time, like Vayante Copeland. I thought he did a nice job. Demetrious Cox is out playing full-time corner, probably for the second time. Arjen Colquhoun played and Jermaine Edmondson played. So we had a lot of guys out there playing, and they're all going to get better because they all had an opportunity to play. So they're going to prepare even more, and they'll know what to work on. That's usually the way it goes. You get more confident.
"Davis is a very good player," Dantonio added. "The quarterback was on target. Everybody's got good players. You can see why they were effective last year. And they didn't quit. Well-coached football team. They were going to have a plan.
"They max protected, and they made plays," Dantonio said of WMU's passing attack. (The max protection component, by the way, was something we highlighted in the Spartan Plus Skull Session podcast and the Pre-Snap Read).
"We played very, very well against the run, it's just that guys got loose," Dantonio said. "They were sort of isolating it and throwing it to No. 84, and he's a good player."
And it should make Cox, and the rest of them, that much better by next week, having faced some quality opposition at the WR position on Friday night.
Jim Comparoni
SpartanMag.com Publisher
Talk about it in The Underground Bunker
KALAMAZOO - Okay, let's be honest. At the conclusion of Friday night's game, we asked ourselves: Based on MSU's uneven 37-24 victory at Western Michigan, do we now feel MSU has a better chance to beat Oregon, or a worse chance?
First of all, the Oregon we have in mind is last year's Oregon. We should table all thoughts about Oregon until we actually see the 2015 Ducks play against an FBS opponent (which they won't until they visit Spartan Stadium next week).
Regardless of whether Oregon's new quarterback, Vernon Adams, is even remotely comparable to 2014 Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota, we can be sure about this: Oregon will have speed at wide receiver. They'll play fast, try to get you tired, make you sub-in some second-string DBs, and then test you with more speed.
I had concerns about MSU's ability to handle high-end speed at wide out prior to Friday's game. Now, those concerns are more well-founded.
That doesn't mean the MSU secondary and the defense as a whole can't be ultimately successful. It's just going to make it trickier, with tighter margin for error.
We knew the Broncos - with the best passing attack in the Mid-America Conference, led by true NFL prospect split end Corey Davis - were going to give the Spartans' new cornerbacks a major college test on opening night. He did, and MSU passed most of the tests, but I come away a bit concerned about the top-end speed of junior cornerback Demetrious Cox, and MSU's other options at the position.
I really like Cox as a player. And he is doing what he can to help this team by playing cornerback. But let's get this straight: MSU has three very good safeties on this team, and one cornerback that I'm currently comfortable with (Vayante Copeland).
Cox is one of the three quality safeties, along with Montae Nicholson and RJ Williamson. Cox is undoubtedly one of the four best DBs on this team. So he needs to be on the field. He is the safety best-suited to move to cornerback, as the Spartans search for answers at that position. He has made the transition to corner, and he looks pretty good in some aspects, very good in other aspects, but when Davis ran past him on a deep go route on Friday night, it might have revealed a little bit about the ceiling of this Spartan defense. And it's a ceiling that the very best offenses and wide receivers might exploit in difference-making situations this season.
Know this: Davis is a terrific receiver. "He's going to get drafted," Michigan State co-defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach Harlon Barnett said outside the locker room following Friday's game, on his way to meet family members and board the team bus.
Cox did a good job of muscling him on some plays. On the deep go route, Cox worked the route properly, turned his hips well, funneled Davis to the outside, and he ran with Davis initially. But then Davis hit another gear and Cox couldn't quite match it. With Davis, once he was even with Cox, he was leavin', as they say.
Davis didn't finish the play, didn't come up with the catch. But the example remains on film. Others will continue to test Cox, the way they tested Darian Hicks last year. The thing Cox has that Hicks didn't have is physical strength at the line of scrimmage. That will help.
Getting beat deep by Davis was no huge sin for Cox. We've seen the great Trae Waynes allow a receiver to run past him from time to time (see the first quarter of the 2014 Rose Bowl).
Cox's top-end speed is something we had to wonder about because we quite frankly haven't seen him play the position (other than a few snaps in the Cotton Bowl), due to practices being closed.
I'm hesitant to arrive at absolutes based on just one game. But it's hard to improve one's top-end speed during the course of a season. I'm not ready to say Cox's speed is a problem. Not at all. He will have plenty of juice against most opponents, on most plays. But we can be sure that Oregon will test him next week. And it might take only one or two failed tests to swing the balance of a game, when you're trying to play for a National Championship.
This is the good thing about Cox: He has excellent size and physicality at the line of scrimmage. He's a team-oriented guy, playing for arguably the best defensive backs coaches in America. He's well-schooled in the fundamentals, and does a good job of taking away inside routes while moving his feet and hips quickly enough to stay in phase.
This skill and physical ability made him an excellent player last night in the red zone. He pressed Davis several times in the red zone, controlled the route, influenced where the passing window would be, and then closed on that window with smarts and physicality. Western Michigan tried to beat him, and Copeland, with fade routes in the red zone, and failed.
Cox's ability to play strong in the red zone is a major, major plus.
Settle It In The Red Zone
Being able to win in red zone is becoming a difference-making component in today's college football. "It's pretty much all about finishing in the red zone today, wouldn't you agree?" said Mississippi State head coach Dan Mullen last January while watching the National Championship Game with other coaches as part of an ESPNU live studio program.
I thought Mullen's quote, and his colleagues' agreement, was fascinating. And I'm not going to argue with him. Learn from him.
The fast, ball-setting rules combined with the uptempo spreads of today's college football have made it harder to stop quality offenses between the 20-yard lines than ever before. Scoring and rushing yardage have escalated, nationally, in recent years, thanks in part to uptempo spread offenses.
Against the best offenses, a Top 10 defense can give up 500 yards and 30-plus points and come out of it feeling it has played well enough to win.
Michigan State has arrived at the philosophy that the answer against the best, uptempo spread teams (such as Oregon) is to stop the run, make a team one-dimensional with the pass, contain those passes between the 20-yard lines by tackling well in space and preventing the big play. And if said offense is proficient enough to get inside your 25-yard line, then stop them there once you're able to squeeze routes a little tighter due to the safeties and slot-area linebacker being able to play in closer quarters as the field shrinks.
Believe it or not, this strategy might have worked just fine against the best offense in the country last year - Baylor. But that game remains a nightmare of sorts for Spartan fans, despite the historic victory. Seeing the Bears throw for 600-plus yards makes some wonder what the heck MSU was doing in pass coverage on that day. Seeing Western Michigan chuck it around for 365 on Friday night reawakens some of those concerns, especially with Waynes having left for the NFL.
The chief problem for MSU in the litmus test against Baylor wasn't the fact that Baylor completed an absurd number of short routes to the free-release slot area, but that the Bears scored
three touchdowns from outside the red zone. MSU felt it was on schedule, defensively, in allowing the short-area, slot stuff while shutting down the run.
MSU planned to stop Baylor in the red zone, and did so on four occasions. MSU forced four Baylor field goals. No one forces Baylor to attempt that many field goals.
But Baylor wrecked MSU's ideas by scoring three times from outside the red zone. (One TD coming on a double-pass trick play, and another when Cox and Williamson miscommunicated on how to squeeze a cover-three seam.) (Baylor punched in a 19-yard TD pass on a trick play to an offensive lineman. Western Michigan went to a similar wrinkle trick of sorts in sneaking an h-back past linebacker Darien Harris for a 29-yard TD.)
Why am I talking about the Baylor game? Because Baylor - along with Ohio State and Oregon - represent the state of the art in college offenses. And Baylor is the most recent state-of-the-art offense that MSU has played. Oregon will be the next. MSU is in the conversation as a National Championship contender. Beating Oregon next week will allow MSU to stay in that conversation.
Some of MSU's theories worked against Baylor. Some didn't. Meanwhile, Western Michigan succeeded in probing some of the soft areas of MSU's zone defense that were also compromised by Baylor.
Was MSU's pass defense exposed by this MAC opponent on Friday night? I wouldn't go that far. Again, I'm cautious about arriving at absolutes.
It was uncomfortable for Spartan fans to watch Western Michigan slot receiver Daniel Braverman scurry around for 13 catches and 109 yards on Friday.
In the SPARTAN Plus Pre-Snap Read, we predicted that Braverman would be a bigger problem than Davis. It's unclear whether that turned out to be true, but the point is that the mixture of WMU's system, along with Braverman's talent and the soft spots in the Spartans' base zone coverage, led us to conclude that the ball was going to get fed to Braverman. MSU knew it, and tried to limit his yards after the catch, while hoping to dish out some hard hit. As it turned out, MSU didn't get than many hard hits on him. That kid is good.
The WMU quarterback was on-time and on-the-money, and Braverman finished all but one of his opportunities (failing to haul in a deep wheel route against Harris, on a well-conceived trick play. On that play, WMU faked a bubble screen to Braverman, then sprung him down the sideline on a the wheel after the bubble action sucked the play-side safety away from helping. This ploy matched Braverman's speed on Harris, giving Braverman the one-step edge in knowing where the play was headed.)
That wheel route wrinkle, and the sneak route to the H-back (and Baylor's TD pass to the offensive lineman) represent the answer to the answer for offenses. If a quality defense such as MSU is going to play bend-but-don't-break and then try to stop you in the red zone, the answer for some offenses is becoming to run trick plays in the red zone, or at the edge of the red zone. Save your trick plays for the edge of the red zone. That's a novel concept. WMU did it on Friday night, and they were smart to do it, because Cox and Copeland were good in the red zone, and Braverman's effectiveness diminishes as the offense gets closer to the goal line.
So why was Braverman so open all the time? That's just the way MSU plays it. Every coverage as a weakness, as Dantonio likes to say. MSU elects to be soft in the slot area. MSU wants to press the corners, play the safeties shallow, and have the slot-area LB (Harris) leaning more to help stop the run than most 4-2-5 defenses might do these days.
Making sure to stop the run leaves MSU a little more vulnerable to short-area curls and some intermediate benders. MSU is willing to make that trade, between the 20s.
Braverman, with his excellent ability to read defenses, and run tight routes, continually sat down in weak spots in the zone. WMU quarterback Zach Terrell, was excellent in anticipating the openings, delivering the ball on-time and on-target, and doing so without telegraphing passes. Dantonio was most impressed with his ability to remain efficient despite getting rocked by seven sacks, and several other hurries and knockdowns.
Some Numbers To Consider
Western Michigan amassed 365 yards on 50 pass attempts.
When including the seven sacks, WMU netted just 326 yards of passing on 57 attempts. That's an average of 5.7 yards per pass attempt. That average would lead the Big Ten in that category, most years.
The 365 yards might seem extreme. But when wrapped within the overall construct, combined with allowing just 18 yards of rushing, and making the Broncos one-dimensional on offense, MSU's pass defense might not have been as substandard as one may think.
Will MSU mix up its coverages a bit more against Oregon, and change the pictures of its soft spots for the new Ducks QB? Changing coverages hasn't been MSU's mode of operation in the past, and that philosophy has served them well.
However, Oregon's run game will be much harder to stop than WMU's. We may see Oregon return to the QB keeper in the spread option being more of a facet to its offense than it was last year, when the Ducks were trying to protect Mariota.
WMU did some good things on offense, but the Broncos don't have nearly the run-pass conflict component that the Ducks will present.
But MSU will play more players than last year, try to stay fresh, try to contain the ground game, try to limit big plays by tackling in space, and stop Oregon in the red zone. In the meantime, there is no margin for error at cornerback. Can't get beat deep. That's where Cox will need to answer.
And so will the other corners.
Copeland was pretty good most of the night. He gave up a route or two to Davis on some fine angle routes. But for the most part, he was excellent for a freshman playing in his first game.
Second-stringers Arjen Colquhoun and Jermaine Edmondson were each beaten on significant plays, in limited playing time. That wasn't a positive.
Overall, MSU's individuals in the secondary didn't get beat much. I counted three or four times in 57 pass attempts. The other completions were structural, not individual beatings. And it's a structure MSU may tweak here and there, but is unlikely to change. And I don't blame them.
"I thought they played pretty well," Dantonio said of the cornerbacks. "I would say they are solid right now. But it's a game-to-game thing.
"We made some mistakes that have got to be cleaned up, but that happens in the first game."
How confident is Dantonio that those mistakes will get corrected?
"Very confident," Dantonio said. "We've got good players. We have players playing for the first time, like Vayante Copeland. I thought he did a nice job. Demetrious Cox is out playing full-time corner, probably for the second time. Arjen Colquhoun played and Jermaine Edmondson played. So we had a lot of guys out there playing, and they're all going to get better because they all had an opportunity to play. So they're going to prepare even more, and they'll know what to work on. That's usually the way it goes. You get more confident.
"Davis is a very good player," Dantonio added. "The quarterback was on target. Everybody's got good players. You can see why they were effective last year. And they didn't quit. Well-coached football team. They were going to have a plan.
"They max protected, and they made plays," Dantonio said of WMU's passing attack. (The max protection component, by the way, was something we highlighted in the Spartan Plus Skull Session podcast and the Pre-Snap Read).
"We played very, very well against the run, it's just that guys got loose," Dantonio said. "They were sort of isolating it and throwing it to No. 84, and he's a good player."
And it should make Cox, and the rest of them, that much better by next week, having faced some quality opposition at the WR position on Friday night.
