At the link:
According to Brian Kelly, the Irish had been preparing for Navy’s offense a little bit each week so that they would be familiar with it once game week arrived and they would practice against it full time. That would seem to indicate that he took Navy pretty seriously, right? If that’s the case, that’s bad news for Notre Dame fans. They better hope that Kelly just didn’t take Navy seriously, because otherwise– and I’m being brutally honest here– he must be clueless. If not him, then at least the defensive staff. I am very serious when I say that those of you who have read this blog for any length of time know the Navy offense better than the staff of paid professionals in South Bend.
At first I didn’t understand it… Did I miss something? There was Coach Kelly telling Sam Ryan at the beginning of the third quarter that Navy was doing things that they hadn’t shown all year. That Navy had “held back” some wrinkle of their offense that caught him off guard. How did I fail to pick up on this new tweak in the offense? Irish defensive coordinator Bob Diaco said the same thing after practice this week.
As it turns out, I hadn’t failed to pick up on anything. Navy wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Kelly and Diaco just have absolutely no clue how the Navy offense works.
Navy started the game in the heavy formation, with two tackles lined up on one side and a wide receiver in the tackle position on the other side. Contrary to Kelly’s comments, this isn’t unusual at all for the Navy offense. Offensive coordinator Ivin Jasper frequently uses the heavy formation when the defense has an inside linebacker with exceptional playmaking ability; in Notre Dame’s case, that would be Manti Te’o. In the spread formation, it’s generally the playside tackle’s responsibility to block the inside linebacker on the triple option, but he might have trouble if the defensive end squeezes him inside. Putting an extra tackle next to him compensates for that by making someone else responsible for blocking the ILB. What it doesn’t do, however, is change the basic mechanics of the play. The first down lineman on or outside the B gap is still unblocked as the quarterback’s first key, and the next player out is still #2 in the count. Since it is the lineman in the B gap that is left unblocked, that’s the path that the fullback takes on his run. If that lineman steps upfield and takes the quarterback, that’s where the running lane will be.
That isn’t something new that the Navy coaches saved for Notre Dame. That is Navy Offense 101. It’s the absolute basics; the bread and butter play run in every game out of every formation. If Diaco and Kelly hadn’t seen it before, then I have no idea what film they’ve been watching, or if they even watched any at all. That isn’t even hyperbole; they thought that Navy’s fullback ran through the A gap. And that was their plan– to send the inside linebackers crashing into the A gap that nobody was running through. That just made those LBs easier to block as either the fullback or quarterback ran right by them and into the secondary.
Now all the coaches’ comments make sense. That’s why Kelly kept calling it “veer.” He thought that the fullback was supposed to run straight up the middle, and that Navy threw a curveball by running one gap outside instead. But it wasn’t a trick; that’s how Navy’s offense has always worked. Now, on the midline option, the fullback does run through the A gap, since it’s an interior defensive lineman that gets left unblocked. The midline is not uncommon, but it is also not the play around which the entire Navy offense revolves. Navy ran the midline a whopping two times on Saturday, both on the last drive of the second quarter.
Once it became obvious that the ILBs had no intention of scraping outside, it was no longer necessary to have an extra tackle on one side of the formation. So Coach Jasper switched back to the base spread formation and just kept running the same play.
Seriously, that’s it. There were some other things tossed in here and there, and we’ll get to those in a minute… But that’s why the fullback and quarterback combined to rush for 300 yards. What’s almost as incredible as this horrible game plan is the fact that despite Kelly’s assertion to the contrary, Notre Dame never adjusted. Those ILBs kept running into the A gap for the entire game. Once or twice Te’o scraped outside to make a play in the backfield, and I’d think,”OK, now we’ll see something else.” But we didn’t. Notre Dame would go right back to the same old thing on the next play, and the Mids would pick up a big gain. Navy never faced 3rd down with longer than 6 yards to go all afternoon, and even that they only saw once. It’s as if the Notre Dame staff flipped on the film projector on Monday morning, said “Oh crap WTF is this,” and decided their best defense would just be to complain about cut blocking and hope for some sympathy from the officials.
Much more at the link...with video to show how not to defend against Navy.
Link: https://thebirddogblog.com/2010/10/29/navy-35-notre-dame-17/