The Air Force Debrief

Each season, the teams that play the best defense against the service academies are the other service academies. But why?

It isn’t because of scheme. The service academies all run more or less the same defense against each other every year. None of it is new. They haven’t found the magical formula that “solves” the option. In fact, other teams frequently study academy games and attempt to imitate those defenses when they have Army, Navy, or Air Force on their schedules. Those teams rarely match the success of the defenses that they try to emulate, and sometimes the results are disastrous. So what is it, then?

The reason why the service academies defend each other so well is that they understand these offenses at an individual level. The players know how to beat cut blocks. They know what the quarterback looks for in his reads and how to create disruption. They know how to keep their eyes in the right place not to lose their gaps or get burned by play action. They know how to play with a low pad level. And the reason why they understand all of these things so well is because they practice it constantly: all spring, the first-team offense lines up against the first-team defense to perfect individual technique. The same thing happens in fall camp; the best option offenses in the country scrimmage against the country's best option defenses, making both sides better. Iron sharpens iron.

On Saturday, there was one team that had a spring practice. The other did not. One team had spent the last month preparing to play one game. The other didn’t hit at all in camp and had two other games to play before being able to dedicate themselves to option prep against the scout team.

Practice matters. Preparation matters. Navy’s 40-7 loss to Air Force was unquestionably disappointing. It wasn’t, however, a surprise.

Well, not entirely, anyway. The margin of victory is admittedly a bit of a shock, but that is mostly because there was optimism that perhaps Navy had turned a corner against Tulane and that maybe the effects of the preparation disparity wouldn’t be that bad. Clearly, that was not the case. The entire situation is truly unprecedented, though, so there was no basis for anybody’s expectations other than hope and assumption.

Still, we talked about some of these things in the preview, didn’t we? We looked at how Air Force’s extra preparation would be a bigger factor in this game than their missing players, precisely for all of the reasons listed above. The difference between winning and losing is a fine line, especially at a service academy. On Saturday, we saw two teams on opposite sides of that line.

How fine is the line? Let’s take a look at two plays, both being the triple option. Both quarterbacks make the correct read, and the blockers for both teams carry out the correct assignments. On the first play, Air Force’s backside safety ignores the twirl motion of the Navy slotback and makes a beeline to the ball immediately at the snap:

On the second play, Navy’s backside safety hesitates for a split second while he reads the play. Rather than make the tackle, he ends up getting caught up in traffic, and the quarterback runs past him:

Both of Air Force’s playside receivers came inside to block the safeties while leaving Cam Kinley unblocked. Kinley was also slow to recognize the play, following the receivers downfield instead of stepping up in run support.

That hesitation, however slight, was the difference between a two-yard gain and a 13-yard gain. When repeated over the course of an entire game, those kinds of plays are the difference between winning and losing. Air Force had 15 plays of 10+ yards. Navy had only four.

Here’s another example. The Navy defense often used a gap exchange between the inside linebackers, where the playside ILB would attack the A gap while the backside ILB would loop around to fill the B gap. When it works, it looks like this:

Unfortunately, it didn’t always work. Here, rather than step into the B gap as he did on the previous play, Fagot paused, which gave the quarterback room to run.

Sometimes, Air Force was able to engineer that hesitation through clever play design. On this play, the fullback looks like he’s headed through the A gap, but cuts back behind a pulling guard to instead run through the opposite B gap. The inside linebacker didn’t know which way to go, and his indecision gave the playside guard enough time to get to him for the block.

Air Force ran a lot of zone and trap plays, but under the right conditions, they also mixed in the triple option in certain situations. Here, the ILBs did the same gap exchange. The defensive end lined up in a 7 technique with C gap responsibility. By running the triple here, the playside guard and tackle had no problem handling the stunting linebackers, since they left the DE unblocked. By lining up so wide, the read became an easy one for the quarterback; even if the DE took the fullback, he was so far away that he wouldn’t get to him in time. The Mids added a missed tackle in the secondary for good measure.

On this inside zone play, the nose guard does a pretty good job driving the center into the backfield, but the fullback still makes the correct read. The linebacker who should have covered that A gap, though, appears to have been occupied by the motion of the tailback. The gap was left completely uncovered.

Air Force also ran a series of zone plays with designed cutbacks to take advantage of Navy’s overpursuit. The Mids did a poor job of covering gaps on the backside of the direction of the play. Here, the Falcons used jet sweep motion opposite the direction of the offensive line to draw backside defenders away from the play. There was nobody covering the C gap.

Ordinarily you might have the safety covering that gap, but Navy was running a corner blitz, so the safety was rolling over to cover the wide receiver.

Here, Cam Kinley covered the C gap, but was late in diagnosing the play and initially followed the receiver inside.

Here, the Mids had an OLB covering the backside C gap, but he couldn’t shed the block of the tight end. An extra ten yards came courtesy of another missed tackle.

Missed tackles were another big problem for Navy. This is an 11-yard gain that should have been stopped for two yards:

Here’s a five-yard gain that turned into 19 yards after missed tackles from Kinley and Kevin Brennan.

I don’t like to single out players when they make mistakes, but I’ll make an exception here because it illustrates Navy’s biggest problem. Look at some of the players committing these errors; guys like Fagot, Kinley, Fochtman, and Brennan. These aren’t new names in the lineup; they’re returning stars. They didn’t make these mistakes in last year’s game, which should tell you something. Navy’s players didn’t suddenly get worse. They weren’t overpowered; they were out of place. They just weren’t as prepared as they usually are for this matchup.

Things weren’t any better on the other side of the ball. Air Force’s defense wasn’t nearly as mistake-prone, although they did make one. Navy motioned into a formation where both slotbacks were lined up in a bunch with a wide receiver. When the Mids lined up this way in last year’s game, they often ran a fullback toss. Air Force shot the cornerback here in anticipation of that, but that left them with only two defenders to cover three receivers:

The Mids had trouble getting anything else going in the passing game, though. Air Force is always one of the better teams when it comes to defending Navy’s passing game, and that was the case again this year. When there were open receivers, Tyger Goslin couldn’t find them; it appeared that he would lock onto one and not go through his progression.

That’s frustrating, because the Mids would often leave an extra blocker and only send three receivers out running routes. That was the case on this play, where Goslin seemed to have time to find the open receiver to his left, but did not.

The same thing happened here. It was clear almost immediately that the wheel-post was covered, but the out pattern on the other side was available:

Here, the receiver actually caught the safety flat-footed and got a couple steps behind him. Goslin didn’t have a chance to find him, though, because the center inexplicably disengaged from the nose guard and allowed him to rush the passer.

Here, Goslin did find the open receiver, but he had to rush his throw. It appeared that Jamale Carothers expected to block the inside linebacker, but was caught out of position when the linebackers stunted and he had to block the OLB instead.

Air Force’s defense wasn’t making the same mistakes against the run that Navy was, so Navy’s big plays were going to have to come from the passing game. They just couldn’t execute.

Navy’s offensive game plan wasn’t as varied as Air Force’s. They clearly wanted to throw the ball, but outside of that it consisted mostly of inside and outside zone plays run out of various formations. It worked at times, but whenever it appeared that the Mids might get a little momentum, they’d shoot themselves in the foot with bad execution, an untimely penalty, or a turnover.

Late in the second quarter, for example, the Mids were facing second and one from their 34 yard line. Even with two chances to get one yard, they couldn’t convert. First, they tried running the inside zone. If Nelson Smith had made the right read, he would have easily picked up the first down and more. Unfortunately, he never had the chance to make that read because he ran right into the back of the center who was pushed into the backfield.

Third and one quickly became third and six after a false start penalty. They couldn’t convert and were forced to punt. Air Force kicked a field goal on the ensuing drive to give themselves a two-score lead heading into the half.

The Mids tried to mix things up a little bit by running a play that worked against Tulane, running a fullback trap opposite pre-snap motion. However, there appeared to be a blocking mixup. Both the OLB and DE were left unblocked, and the pulling guard could only take one of them.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this?

Watching the game, the thing that stuck out to me the most was how much faster Air Force was. I don’t mean faster in the track meet, what’s-your-40-time sort of way; I mean football fast. I mean the kind of speed that comes from confidence in what you’re doing, like the quickness of the fullback hitting the hole or the immediate reaction of defenders recognizing a play as it develops. That confidence is gained through preparation. Air Force was prepared, and Navy was not.

The good news for Navy is that this game was indeed a perfect storm. Air Force plays well on both sides of the ball against Navy even in a normal year. In a season where Air Force is far ahead of schedule on option prep while Navy is far behind, the Mids were destined for calamity. In a big picture, state-of-the-program sense, this game was meaningless. These circumstances will never occur again. However, in terms of what to expect the rest of the season, one can’t help but feel a bit uneasy.

Fortunately, only one team left on the schedule— Army— matches up with Navy the way Air Force does. The bad news is that teams like Temple, SMU, and Memphis (to name a few) present their own set of challenges, and I don’t know how much improvement is possible over the rest of the season. There are no more weekends off until Thanksgiving; no weeks where the team can focus on themselves instead of planning for an opponent. Without progress, it’s difficult to see how the team will keep pace with mile-a-minute offenses like Houston’s or a Tulsa defense that’s coming into its own.

Then again, we don’t know. There’s no blueprint for Navy’s situation. Maybe improvement is possible, maybe not. The only thing certain is that it’s necessary.