Those are really good basics

by Mike (bart), Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 19:50 (28 days ago) @ Joe

I think you got the gist but just to go on a little farther:

- Golden's 1-Robber schemes really let him be creative. He'd have most cover players in man, usually a safety deep, and another guy with either a typical robber role or else something specific. He could shuffle those responsibilities around as well - he ended up having a ton of success with 4 or 5 man pressures with relatively circumspect defense behind it, especially because he'd mess with the QB's key reads so the ball very rarely came out quickly. Here's an illustrative example from Louisville 2024: https://bluegraysky.com/forum/index.php?id=543336

The weakness of an approach like this is you aren't exactly presenting a wall at the point of attack. Golden's bet was always that the offense would get impatient (due to being behind the sticks or whatever) and not be able to hit you for 4 yard carries down the field. It also requires a lot of trust in and coordination from your back end players. We could likely pull it off this year but in general it's a hard thing to count on.

Ash's defense is a lot more straightforward. He made his bones as a match quarters guy (the safeties play at shallow depth and go deep with any vertical route run right at them) and, if they don't have a pass read they are aggressively coming down into the run fit/short area (the corners are (usually) coached to let any in breaking route go and trigger into man coverage mode on vertical stemming routes or else hold their zone drops. That structure got too predictable and was essentially vaporized by RPOs but Cover 3 versions (ie Sabans rip/liz match) has matured particularly by using hybrid body types and moving safeties around and in doing so and absorbed a lot of the route distributions common to spread passing and you can wind up with defensive backfields that really know the rules and know route distributions super well and can play very aggressively. There's a lot less disguise and schematic design with something like what Ash is trying to do, but it can be pretty foolproof if you've got the horses and the know how on the field