The wizardry behind K-State’s DL play

At Football Study Hall I broke down K-State’s great run of DL play this decade, particularly their play at defensive end.

I include some notes on their “heavy” technique they use for defending smashmouth spread tactics with only five defenders in the box. I noticed them doing this effectively against the 2016 Texas Longhorn run game and was amazed.

North Dakota State has some similar tricks they like to use to try and avoid getting out of their tampa-2 or quarters coverages that can’t otherwise handle all four interior gaps. They tend to use more Nose-3-tech stunts or T-E stunts that just muck up the works and they’ll drop their boundary safety down pretty often as well. I’m not aware of any other teams around the league that really look to play the run with five in the box save for Oklahoma State and they don’t have as many tricks to help their guys out, they just often have a really good linebacker or safety that can close ground and make the tackle before too much damage is done.

Most teams in this league don’t have good enough DL to bother with any tricks for helping them play an undermanned front and instead send extra help from the secondary. That’s a big reason that K-State stands out and wins a lot…

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Don’t forget you can read up on a lot of Snyder-type tricks from reading (or now watching!) Bennett-disciple Coach A over at MatchQuarters.com. Bennett learned much of his defense from Snyder that he successfully employed at Baylor and is now bringing to Arizona State.