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2017 tOSU Special Teams Discussion

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Tanner said:
Ross Fulton says they need better athletes on their kick cover team. Is that the problem? I don't know who's on the main unit but it seems un-Urban like to not have some of his better athletes on it.
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so i've watched brocoli's td return a couple of times now and this is what i see at present. the kick was exactly where you want it to be, kicker gets a win. the linked is a just flat out horrid view of what actually happened, the replay of the kickoff shows a much better view of what actually caused the problem. it shows the entire return from behind the coverage unit. but i can't seem to find that on youtube anywhere. however, if you look really closely i think you will see what im seeing.

skip to 7 second mark. what i see is #20 has moved far too much inside and has now entered into #47's lane of responsibility leaving his own lane open. either as a response to #20 or just a mental error of his own #19 moves inside as well loosing his lane of responsibility as well. so we now have 2 guys out of their lanes which is always fatal for a defense or kick coverage team. from what i can tell we essentially have 3 guys covering at most 1 1/2 lanes. what compounds this to the point of being completely unrecoverable is #19 gets absolutely blown up by the blocker. big kudos to the psu blocker on that one, just a heck of a block. so because of the double lane assignment breakdown and the great block there is simply nothing there that can stop the return. no defensive unit will ever survive two assignment errors at the point of attack.



on the short kick off to the right side that #7 had a big return on was an assignment problem as well. this one im a little less critical of because i seriously doubt we practice this type of kick often. further, the far left gunner doesn't have near the contain responsibility experience that the right side gunner would as we almost exclusively kick deep to the left. but on that play he runs to the ball instead of continuing downfield enough to deny the cut back and allowed the break of contain.

i like the idea of the targeted kicking and condensed coverage. when you do it right its absolutely brutal and can completely hamstring an offense. however, it really requires a high level of execution by the kicker and the coverage team. there is risk in every coverage and the offense ALWAYS has the advantage. it just a question of how much risk your willing to live with.

**NOTE** please DO NOT hate mail these kids. they didn't violate their responsibilities in an attempt to loose the game. this was just a single mental error that psu was talented enough to take advantage of. as far as i can tell both #19 and #20 corrected their mistakes and played their lanes properly in each kickoff that followed. while we have had a whole host of coverage issues. i haven't seen anything that leads me to suspect their being a systemic issue owing to a specific player or players. everything i see so far leads me to believe these are young guy mistakes being made by young guys. while i would feel better about them being made in week 2 instead of this deep into the season....
 
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Coverage has changed these days. Guys aren't responsible for their "lane" anymore. Watch every kick off and you will see 20 and 19 leave their "lanes". Different responsibilities now days the way they cover. They have some guys assigned to take out blockers while others fall in behind and trail them to squeeze the ball. Times have changed in how they are coached.
 
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PENN STATE QUOTEBOOK: URBAN MEYER DEFLECTS KICKOFF QUESTIONS, DEMETRIUS KNOX IMPRESSES AGAIN, SAM HUBBARD DISCUSSES DOUBLE TACKLE AND NITTANY LIONS PRAISE BUCKEYES

Meyer acknowledged after Saturday’s game that kickoffs continued to be a problem for the Buckeyes, but on a night where his team made an epic fourth-quarter comeback to win its biggest game of the year, he expressed his desire to leave it that.

"Our kickoff coverage, I'm not even going to take questions on that," Meyer said in his postgame press conference. "We're going to have to just make some serious changes on personnel and everything else. That was a comedy."

When one reporter ignored that request, however, and decided to ask Meyer about the kickoff issues anyway, Ohio State’s coach gave a deadpan response.

"J.T. is a great leader and he's a guy I love to death," Meyer said, referencing Ohio State quarterback J.T. Barrett while diverting completely away from the question and eliciting laughter from the room.

Entire article: https://www.elevenwarriors.com/ohio...us-knox-impresses-again-sam-hubbard-discusses
 
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I wonder why we don't do a standard kickoff formation and then have the right side of the line crash down? Same end result with the focus being on pinning them deep but if the guys have more of an angle to run in from I think we'd see less teams swinging wide. Kind of like the kickoff Left play on Madden or NCAA
 
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martinss01 said:
so i've watched brocoli's td return a couple of times now and this is what i see at present. the kick was exactly where you want it to be, kicker gets a win. the linked is a just flat out horrid view of what actually happened, the replay of the kickoff shows a much better view of what actually caused the problem. it shows the entire return from behind the coverage unit. but i can't seem to find that on youtube anywhere. however, if you look really closely i think you will see what im seeing.

skip to 7 second mark. what i see is #20 has moved far too much inside and has now entered into #47's lane of responsibility leaving his own lane open. either as a response to #20 or just a mental error of his own #19 moves inside as well loosing his lane of responsibility as well. so we now have 2 guys out of their lanes which is always fatal for a defense or kick coverage team. from what i can tell we essentially have 3 guys covering at most 1 1/2 lanes. what compounds this to the point of being completely unrecoverable is #19 gets absolutely blown up by the blocker. big kudos to the psu blocker on that one, just a heck of a block. so because of the double lane assignment breakdown and the great block there is simply nothing there that can stop the return. no defensive unit will ever survive two assignment errors at the point of attack.



on the short kick off to the right side that #7 had a big return on was an assignment problem as well. this one im a little less critical of because i seriously doubt we practice this type of kick often. further, the far left gunner doesn't have near the contain responsibility experience that the right side gunner would as we almost exclusively kick deep to the left. but on that play he runs to the ball instead of continuing downfield enough to deny the cut back and allowed the break of contain.

i like the idea of the targeted kicking and condensed coverage. when you do it right its absolutely brutal and can completely hamstring an offense. however, it really requires a high level of execution by the kicker and the coverage team. there is risk in every coverage and the offense ALWAYS has the advantage. it just a question of how much risk your willing to live with.

**NOTE** please DO NOT hate mail these kids. they didn't violate their responsibilities in an attempt to loose the game. this was just a single mental error that psu was talented enough to take advantage of. as far as i can tell both #19 and #20 corrected their mistakes and played their lanes properly in each kickoff that followed. while we have had a whole host of coverage issues. i haven't seen anything that leads me to suspect their being a systemic issue owing to a specific player or players. everything i see so far leads me to believe these are young guy mistakes being made by young guys. while i would feel better about them being made in week 2 instead of this deep into the season....
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Great breakdown.

This has been happening regularly all year against very average athletes, so of course it's going to happen against the nation's best (who did nothing but run straight ahead). We saw PSU do it again with a 250 lb blocker. This is 100% on Urban and his lust for bad field position. Claiming they can't kick it deep is laughable, and the alignment/direction expose that in a heartbeat.
 
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I've changed my position on directional kicking. Fuck it. Kick it out if the end zone every time if you can. The defense is good enough to let the opponents start at the 25 after every kickoff. Shitty ST coverage nearly cost us Saturday...
 
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jwinslow said:
Great breakdown.

This has been happening regularly all year against very average athletes, so of course it's going to happen against the nation's best (who did nothing but run straight ahead). We saw PSU do it again with a 250 lb blocker. This is 100% on Urban and his lust for bad field position. Claiming they can't kick it deep is laughable, and the alignment/direction expose that in a heartbeat.
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but thats the nature of a defensive unit though. if you have 2 guys at the point of attack drop their responsibility a dude in a wheelchair is going to pick up yardage in chunks. hell, when i played football my 40 time was measured in minutes. if you gave me the ball and 2 guys jumped in the wrong gap im going to get you a first down every single time. against a guy like broccoli (or anyone faster than a snail) its probably going to be a score.

it does fall on urban, yes. however, there is no schematic problem with what he is trying to do. we know FOR A FACT this works. hell, we have watched it work for years now. it took something like 3 games to get the kicking straightened out and that "seems" to be there or close. however, we have seen a lot of missed assignments. as i look at it i don't see "a guy" who is singularly responsible for each breakdown. so i don't think it is a "that guy needs to be benched" situation.

this is a unit that really concerns me. not because they are giving up scores. that happens. it just does. for the people who don't get that, pick another sport to watch. the part that worries me is that we are still seeing multiple guys making mental mistakes consistently this far into the season. i really need to look back to last year to see who all was on the kick coverage team. assuming we still have all of those guys on the roster, "for the short term" we might want to sprinkle some of the guys who have graduated from kick coverage back to that team for a couple of weeks.

whether or not we can kick the ball into the end zone is kind of irrelevant really, the important bit is can we kick it out of the end zone every single time? youth and turnover on this unit is hurting our coverage team. just telling a young kid "don't try to win the game, just do your job" isn't always enough. sometimes they have to sit down and watch someone "just do their job" a few times after you have tried for it to fully sink in. again, this may not be plausible. i haven't checked that. but this is without question consistently a problem with multiple guys making mental mistakes.

jwinslow, just as a heads up. going back to a conventional kickoff alignment may be a worse idea than sticking with what we are doing. as you noted with the second long psu return, our left side dropped the ball big time on that return. so you could very easily trade one problem for two problems. additionally, if you can't consistently kick the ball out of the end zone, thats a huge problem if that is your solution. right now our left side has 0 contain responsibilities. they just crash. if you open it up conventional, they have contain responsibilities now. additionally, if you can't kick it out of the end zone every kick. that very easily could be more dangerous than the angled deep sideline kick. i would argue that we are actually better off just kicking the damn thing out of bonds than going conventional and kicking deep from what i have seen thus far. that may not be true because i don't know for a fact how consistent we could be kicking the ball through the end zone every kick.
 
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MililaniBuckeye said:
I've changed my position on directional kicking. Fuck it. Kick it out if the end zone every time if you can. The defense is good enough to let the opponents start at the 25 after every kickoff. [Mark May]ty ST coverage nearly cost us Saturday...
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THAT is the key. if you can't kick it out of the end zone consistently every single kick off this is NOT a viable option. it would actually make our kick coverage WORSE than it is now. what makes the angled kickoff coverage so brilliant isn't just that it bunches ever thing up making it difficult for a return. from a player perspective it changes how many of a very specific athlete type you need. think about it from a dline perspective. suddenly you don't need 2 elite d ends, you only need one. the rest can be really good middle line backer types who plug holes. if you go the "just kick it out of the end zone" mindset you almost certainly need to change your personnel on the left side. further, every kick that doesn't go OUT OF THE END ZONE is a return. a return against a coverage unit that has had multiple mental break downs with half the responsibility of a conventional unit. thats a lot of danger imo.

i don't think meyer meant that our kicker is incapable of kicking the ball out of the end zone. what i suspect he meant is he isn't consistent enough to do it every time. i play competitive sand volleyball. we play rally scoring so every serve someone gets a point so every serve matters just like with a kickoff. i know a lot of guys who like to use the "super look at me im nifty" 90 mile per hour jump serve. and some of them are legit tough to handle. but i laugh at those guys because their serves are typically NOT consistent. and at the end of the day it doesn't matter if your first serve was an ace if your second was in the middle of the net. congrats on your super ninja serve, your overall contribution to winning was absolutely nothing.

the serves that worry me the most you ask? the guys who can put it within a foot of where they want to every single time. those guys win games with their serves alone because they find a weak spot and then murder you when you try to adjust against it.
 
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The obvious answer is to kick it out of the end zone. If, as Meyer has stated, that isn't an option, then it's time to come up with something else. With the speed we have, would it not be feasible to kick the ball higher (and shorter) to attempt to drop it at the 20-25 yard line? This would force an up back to catch the ball, typically using a fair catch. Given that the guy isn't used to catching kickoffs, I would think you'd have a higher potential for drops & turnovers....... Just a thought I had......
 
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martinss01 said:
THAT is the key. if you can't kick it out of the end zone consistently every single kick off this is NOT a viable option.
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Didn't Haubeil's dad just tweet that Blake had over 100 KO touchbacks in high school (and subsequently deleted the tweet). Maybe tell Blake to kick it through the end zone, but make sure it's left of the left hash marks, so that if it is short the squeeze coverage could still work.
 
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MililaniBuckeye said:
Didn't Haubeil's dad just tweet that Blake had over 100 KO touchbacks in high school (and subsequently deleted the tweet). Maybe tell Blake to kick it through the end zone, but make sure it's left of the left hash marks, so that if it is short the squeeze coverage could still work.
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im certainly good with that. but a touch back and through the back of the end zone are different things. if im playing tOSU next week i seriously consider telling my returners to bring it out even if its 9 yrds deep in the end zone no matter what spot its kicked to. i can't speak for the iowa coaches. but id be far more confident trying to return the ball under any circumstances than going toe to toe with our d *shrug*.
 
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