That’s the name I came up with when describing an approach to anti-spread defense that focuses on doubling an opponent’s star players while leaving the rest of the offense at advantage.
You can read about it at Football Study Hall, I use Oklahoma’s win over Texas in the Big 12 title game and K-State’s “blueprint” for the 2015 Baylor Veer and Shoot as examples. Over at Inside Texas I’ll have a breakdown this week that includes another scheme that isn’t in that Football Study Hall piece for how to outnumber the run against an option team and double the slot, although that scheme didn’t work in the game I’m breaking down. It’s a scheme Wisconsin brought to the 2014 Big 10 title game against Ohio State only to get shredded 59-0 by Cardale Jones and Zeke Elliott.
The idea is to borrow from the NBA in doubling and trapping the best players on opposing teams to get the ball out of their hands and then helping very liberally off the non-shooters on the team. What made the Cavs the perennial Eastern Conference champions was the way they could often get four shooters on the floor with LeBron James to prevent opponents from getting help over to stop the king. Then Magic Johnson determined that strategy was dumb and what really mattered was toughness, so he surrounded LeBron with non-shooting headcases.
Spread-iso ball is tough to stop if you don’t embrace the extremes and play matchup defense with help shaded to the iso players, ready to live with the results if the ball goes elsewhere at advantage.