The 3-High Safety Defense: Why We Converted

Coach Jacob Gill explains why they moved to the 3-Safety defense as such a huge part of their base package.

Automated Transcript:

So after we identified what we wanted to do, and began talking to people about how to do it, what not to do, we kind of we kind of stumbled our way into it. And this is kind of what we've, we found along the way over the last couple of years. Probably like a lot of you guys were defending more and more versions of the spread a couple of different types, whether it's, you know, 1011, or 20, like power spread type stuff, which is when our offense runs, or to straight like air raid and empty stuff, we figured out, we're seeing more spread, and we're seeing more speeds, we need more speed. And so we thought we found through this that this gives us an opportunity to get one more speed body on the field in either the second level or the third level, sometimes for us, and the first level when we get into some some personnel things, but we like it because we feel like it gives us the ability to defend the width and the depth of the field, every snap, I know a lot of you guys are seeing it, I know we're seeing it, our offense does a great job of stretching the defense horizontally and vertically. And in order to do that, you've got to be able to have bodies in space. And we felt like as we started working through this system, this gives us a better option of getting more skill bodies in more space so that as we're getting stretched horizontally and vertically, we're able to defend those concepts better. The next thing we found was, hey, this is a great way for us to get our best 11 on the field, and how do we get our best 11 to be our 11 Best, here's what I mean by that our 11 best players may not in what we were doing have been part of that best 11 group on the field, we feel like having this structure in place. And having this option in our defense allows us more ways to not only make opportunities for our best players to get on the field, but to put them in a situation where our best players lead to being our best group because we want you guys know defensive football is about 11 guys playing together as one. So now we feel like we've got another way to take our best talented players and put them in a situation to be in a more cohesive unit on the field. And then as we got into it, we started discovering, hey, that third safety adds a lot of variants to what we're doing. He gives us some multiplicity in box fits in coverage in pressures and blitzing. Who's fitting the Ron who's defeating the past, as we started to work this system into what we were already doing, we were starting to recognize, hey, we can get pretty creative here. And we can really have some options at our disposal that fit our kids that are not what we've currently been doing. And so for us, then it led to, well, hey, how much coverage can we run? How much pressure can we run? How can we fit all this together and make this work for us. And the more and more and more we got into it, the more we realized, Hey, there, this gives us a lot of options. But we can tie this into what we're already doing. And make it as seamless as possible to where it doesn't feel like we're completely throwing out everything we like and completely starting from scratch. But that the more we get into this, the more we really like it. And then for us the kind of the hard, hard sell for us was as we started doing this, our offense is a really good our offensive staff is really good. And as we were running this in practice and in kind of really tinkering with it in spring ball and summer, having those conversations with the offensive staff saying man, that's, that's different. Hey, that's, that's tough, that that really hurts us or we're really makes us defensive in this area, hearing an offensive guy share that what you're doing defensively is challenging or it's different or it's forcing them to have to do Plan B or Plan C or whatever it is. I think that's affirmation that hey, what we're doing not only do we like it, because we like it, but we also like it now because we know it's effective. And so we were starting to see the fruit of that. Even just in our spring practice in summer practices

of, hey, this is an opportunity for us to to really add to what we're doing in making more difficult for people to prepare for us. And that's what we ultimately we want to be offensively and defensively in our program. We want to be a team that's really hard to prepare for, whether it's because we've got great talent, or we've got good scheme or it's different scheme or a combination of any of those things. Hopefully, when people are preparing to play us, we're giving them multiple things to have to consider as they try to formulate a plan on how to attack us.

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