Extra Points: The Match Game

By Lee Pace

The genesis of the defensive system that Carolina football and coordinator John Papuchis use today dates to the mid-1990s and a frustrated coach trying to prepare his Cleveland Browns to face the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers at the time had the ability to play smash-mouth inside the tackles and pound you to a pulp, but they also had some good receivers and were playing at times with four-wides—one of the early NFL teams to flirt with a spread attack. The Browns favored a Cover-3 base (three deep defensive backs playing thirds of the field), which was soft if the Steelers sent four receivers deep on "go" routes.

The alternative for the Browns was to play more man-to-man. But there was a downside to that as there wasn't as much bulk in the trenches to deal with the running game. "So you have to play 'cat' coverage," said Nick Saban, the Browns' defensive boss. "You have your cats, we have our cats. It comes down to who has the best cats."

It wasn't the Browns, for sure. That year the Browns were 12-6, losing twice to the Steelers in the regular season and once to them in the playoffs.

"We gave up the fifth fewest points in the history of the NFL and lost to the Steelers three times because we could not play eight-man fronts to stop the run," Saban groused.

The answer that eventually sprouted in the fertile minds of Saban and head coach Bill Belichick, both master tinkerers and strategists long before they became Hall of Fame head coaches, was to develop a hybrid defense, something that would combine the best of zone and man principles and evolve snap-by-snap based on formations and what happens once the quarterback touches the ball and the receivers launch downfield.

"We came up with this concept, how we can play cover-1 and cover-3 at the same time, so we can do both these things and one thing would complement the other," Saban said.

The result was a "pattern-match" defense that Saban created in Cleveland and later exported to jobs at Michigan State, LSU and Alabama. In a traditional zone, a defender drops to a spot, watches the quarterback and reacts to any receiver in that zone. Saban's tweak called for a defender to pick up the first receiver in his zone and play him man-to-man—unless that receiver crosses with another, at which point the defender next to him would trade responsibilities. It's a close cousin of the match-up zone in basketball.

"Offenses have evolved and they're certainly throwing the ball more," says Papuchis, who's entering his second year as the Tar Heels' defensive coordinator. "What Coach Saban did was find a way to put bodies on bodies and make it difficult for the quarterback. You have to have seven coverage guys all working together to make it happen. The rules are built in, and if they communicate and see the routes unfold, it works really well."

Spot-dropping is easier. Pattern-matching is more challenging. It puts the onus on defenders' ability to correctly read pre- and post-snap keys and make the right calls in the heat of battle. But it's an effective way to play stout against the run but be nimble against the "basketball-on-grass" mentality of modern passing games.

It's now the scheme of choice for many football teams, as Saban has been free to dissect it in coaching clinics and those who have worked with him have taken the concepts to other jobs—a la Kirby Smart at Georgia and Jeremy Pruitt as defensive coordinator at Florida State and now as head coach at Tennessee. Bo Pelini used a version of the pattern-match while running LSU's defense from 2005, and Papuchis learned it during his four years at LSU under Saban and Pelini from 2004-07 and developed it further as coordinator under Pelini at Nebraska.

"The level of precision and communication is critical," Papuchis says. "There are times we pass routes off based on splits, based on releases. We put bodies on bodies and play with a zone-ish mentality, but once a route starts to declare itself, we're matched man-to-man. Once a route is declared down the field, now we're playing essentially man-to-man.

"When the pattern-match is done correctly, it's a great thing to watch."

Papuchis is certainly hoping for better things in 2018 as the Tar Heels attempt to rebound from a season in which they yielded 436 yards and 31 points a game and were hounded by yielding big plays at inopportune times.

"We would play good defense for long stretches of games and then give up a big play. That was evident all season," Papuchis says. "It might be one guy missing a tackle in space. It might be a couple of guys not communicating in coverage. It was a lot of different things. Our goal this spring is to develop our guys individually and as a team to play four solid quarters and never let the wheels fall off. Every time we take the field, we have an opportunity to get a three-and-out or a takeaway. That's our mindset."

The Tar Heels over the last two decades have had three eras of playing stout defense. The 1996-97 units are the gold standard as Mack Brown's program hit its apex, the Tar Heels allowing an average of 11.5 points and 217 yards a game in posting a combined 21-3 record. Butch Davis's 2009 defense yielded 17 points and 270 yards a game and was poised for greatness in 2010 before massive player suspensions gutted the two-deep. And the 2015 defense under first-year coordinator Gene Chizik bounced back remarkably from a dismal 2014 by yielding only 21 points a game during the regular season, that total including going relatively conservative and with second-teamers during the second half of blow-out wins over Duke and N.C. State. But the ACC title game (45 points by Clemson) and bowl game (49 by Baylor) blew that total to smithereens.

"Coming off the 2014 season into '15, we had an intensity about us, an edge," says Donnie Miles, a three-year starter at safety whose senior year in 2017 was curtailed by injury. "No one gave us a chance. Every team we played against thought they could move the ball on us. That motivated us. We competed in practice every day, every position to make big plays. Last year, we had some young guys and a lot of injuries. And it seemed like we could never find a way to win. We were in the Cal game, but couldn't find a way to win. We were with Louisville at the end, but couldn't find a way to win. Same with Duke.

"This team has to have that edge like we had and someone has to step up in the fourth quarter and make a play."

Among candidates to provide those crunch plays when needed is junior safety Myles Dorn, who's matured physically and mentally into the player the coaching staff felt he could be when he committed out of Charlotte in December 2015.

"Give me 20 like him," says first-year safeties coach Tommy Thigpen. "Myles practices hard, plays hard and has a 'care factor' through the roof. If he stays healthy, he can be as good as anyone in the country."

Linebackers coach Mike Ekeler is anxious to get veteran Cole Holcomb back from offseason surgery but was encouraged by the play of Jonathan Smith and Dominique Ross in the season finale against N.C. State last November. The infamous injury epidemic of 2017 hit linebacker hard, and Ekeler had only four players dressed for that game but thought Smith and Ross handled the pressure of the situation with aplomb and set themselves up for significant improvement as juniors.

Senior tackle Aaron Crawford has had an excellent spring, and junior tackle Jason Strowbridge is poised to give offenses fits with the mass and power of an inside guy and the twitch and burst of an outside player. Thigpen, who returns to Carolina after stints at Auburn and Tennessee, looks with a fresh set of eyes at the Tar Heels' defensive front and says, "They're loaded. They're as good as I've been around."

While the coaching staff continues to teach scheme and technique and develop what it hopes will be a solid two-deep roster, it will keep beating the bushes for the prototype player it needs to stockpile to move the needle back toward those mid-1990s and late 2000s glory days. Ekeler tells a story of working with current LSU coach Ed Orgeron at USC in 2013 that sets the template for what the coaches are looking for.

"Coach O told me that in any given year, there are about five guys who are totally different from everyone else," Ekeler says. "Everyone else is pretty similar. So recruiting is all about getting the ones who are tough and smart and love to play football. Those are the ones you win with. That stuck with me."

Ekeler talks of fielding calls from NFL scouts over a career in which nearly 30 of his players have gone on to the pros. They invariably ask him on a scale of one to ten to rank a player based on his toughness and his love for the sport. That's before they ask about character and intangibles.

"This is tough man's game," Ekeler says. "It's made for tough individuals. And if a kid doesn't love it, he'll never be great. And if he's not smart, he won't last in school. We're asking him to make split-second decisions and process a bunch of information in the blink of an eye. So if you can't do that, you can't play, either.

"Smart, tough guys who love the game will always find their way on the field. That's a formula that will last forever."

Lee Pace just completed his 28th year covering Tar Heel football through "Extra Points" and 14th as the sideline reporter for the Tar Heel Sports Network. His book, "Football in a Forest," is available in bookstores across North Carolina and online at www.johnnytshirt.com. Email him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @LeePaceTweet.

Players Mentioned

Aaron Crawford

Myles Dorn

Cole Holcomb

Donnie Miles

Dominique Ross

Jonathan Smith

Jason Strowbridge

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