New Grantland: Breakdown of Gary Patterson’s TCU 4-2-5 Defense

New Grantland: Breakdown of Gary Patterson’s TCU 4-2-5 Defense

I’ve been working for a few months on a deep-dive analysis of Gary Patterson’s morphing, multifarious 4-2-5 defense for Grantland, and it’s now up. Patterson’s defense is intriguing on a number of levels, and not only because TCU is ranked #2 in the preseason AP polls: Patterson’s 4-2-5 is custom built for the kinds of…

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Anatomy of a game winner – TCU-Wisconsin

Sometimes you can scheme it up, even execute it up, and then some guy named Tank bats the ball down and you go home a loser. On the final two-point play, TCU had this defensive blitz on: On the two-point play, TCU made two errors: the weak safety failed to cover the tight-end/innermost slot to…

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Defending the zone-read: athleticism and the “scrape-exchange”

Much of what is new in defending the spread involves giving different looks on the backside of all those “zone-read” and other read plays that spread teams are so fond of. For example, on the typical zone-read play, the line is responsible for blocking everyone but the backside defensive end; the quarterback “reads” him. If…

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