An Eye for your Opponents

by: Matt Fulks
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Mike Van Deist keeps a close eye on personel match-ups and ways to exploit them.

It’s been repeated almost too many times to say again. But, here you go: defense wins championships. Hold the urge to roll your eyes until you look at Carroll College in Montana.

During Mike Van Diest’s seven-year reign as head coach at Carroll, the Saints have become an NAIA powerhouse, winning the national championship the last four years after reaching the semifinals six straight times. It stands to reason that when it comes to preparing his teams, Van Diest knows how to scout his opponents, including the three important positions for a team that expects to compete in the pass-friendly Frontier Conference – defensive backs, the offensive line and wide receivers.

With all three positions, Van Diest looks for the best matchups and where he thinks his Saints have the advantage, whether it’s with talent, size, speed, and so on, which he learns from meticulously reviewing game tape. He wants to compare his individual players and scheme with his opponent’s. For instance, Van Diest might realize that his opponent’s defensive backs are better pass defenders than they are run defenders, and he wants to find ways to create match-up problems that way.
“It’s as much about seeing how our personnel matches up to them as it is seeing how they match up with us,” he says. “We look at what personnel we want on the field and how we compare with what they’re going to have out there. They may look great on film against a team, but maybe that opponent didn’t have as much speed at the receivers as we have and can utilize.”

Because of great technological advancements, Van Diest uses film to focus on each individual player to learn his physical abilities and traits, plus he looks at the team’s overall scheme. “When I first came into coaching, you were allowed to go out and scout teams live,” he said. “From that, we could watch them in pre-game drills and listen to the quarterback’s cadence in different situations during the game. We could see jersey numbers and see who played where. Even though we can’t do that now, film is so clear and there’s so much information that you can plug into the laptop, and it’ll spit all of this stuff at you.

“As a coach, you just have to decide how much you’re going to use and how much you’re going to share with your team. You want them to have an idea of what’s going on, but I think we sometimes give them so much information that we take away from the actual playing of the game.”

DEFENSIVE BACKS

Mike Van Diest knows how to coach his defense. After all, the Saints’ defense has been in the top 10 in the NAIA every year since 2001. So, when it comes to watching his opponents’ defensive backs, he knows what he wants to scout. And, more importantly, what he needs to scout. He starts off looking at their opponent’s type of scheme, whether it’s zone or man, and then he and his staff break down individual players.

“We try to see what we can take advantage of in terms of, if we want to throw the ball into the secondary, which side do we want to go to,” he said. “Is there a safety that they’d rather bring into the box because he’s a better run defender? Is there a guy who’s a better pass defender? So, we try to see where they put their best players on the field and where they put their best players to make big plays.

“With their secondary, we like to see if they like to get up there and jam you. Or, do they play soft off the line of scrimmage? That determines what type of passing game we’ll use. Are we going to go with a ‘90’s game of a three-step drop, or do we go with a five-step drop with some crafty passing?”

As the Saints move the ball down the field – which they obviously do often based on their 6,588 yards of offense (3,334 passing, 3,254 rushing) and their 38.6 points per game during their 2005 undefeated season – they eventually wind up in the red zone, often. To Van Diest, it’s an area on the field that has changed so much over the years.

“It used to be two backs and they’d crash heads with the defense. Now, some teams will be empty in the backfield with a four- or five-man spread,” he said. “Again, though, for us it goes back to matchups. If we don’t have a great two-back, two-tight end package, and they come in more physical, we might like to use speed and keep them more spread out. Or, if we can bring in what we call our ‘buffalo package,’ two backs and two tight ends, and we think we’re more physical up front, then we want to run that. It goes back to what they have personnel wise from what we’ve seen from tapes of previous games.”

OFFENSIVE LINEMEN

If there’s one position that’s basically stayed the same in football, it’s the offensive line. Sure, coaches experiment with their linemen’s pre-snap stance and using different players, such as the tight end or fullback, to help block. But there aren’t many things you can – or would want to – do with the offensive linemen.
“That’s one thing about the game of football,” said Van Diest. “On defense it’s gone from four-man fronts and three linebackers and four defensive backs, to three-man fronts with two or three linebackers and five or six defensive backs. But the one thing that stays constant is the offensive line. Sometimes they might go unbalanced, which can be hard to pick up on film, but otherwise offensive lines haven’t changed much.”

So, scouting the offensive line hasn’t changed too drastically. Van Diest still wants to know angles, splits and possible tendencies, which he can see largely from the end-zone camera shot. He also watches to see to which side of the offensive line his opponent likes to run. He wants to know where the running backs are most comfortable, especially on a situation such as third-and-short.

“We also want to see if they’re stronger in their run-block or in their pass protection,” he said. “Also, which guard do they pull the most? Do the linemen show a certain tendency on the run or pass? Those are all things that I want to know about the offensive line, along with tendencies of each player.”
Ah, yes, tendencies. Teams always look for pre-snap tips, particularly on first down and in the red zone. Van Diest looks carefully to see what the offense’s “bread-and-butter play” might be, and behind which lineman. “In the red zone with offensive linemen, we like to see if they show any tendencies that they haven’t shown already,” said Van Diest, who has guided two Carroll teams, 2003 and 2005, to perfect records. “Are their splits bigger, are they tighter, and is their weight forward or back? You try to get a line on what they do. I don’t know that it’s as much about the offensive line in the red zone, as it is formations and personnel, but you can see if the offensive line does anything differently down there.

“The big thing we want to know with offensive linemen in the red zone is if different linemen are coming into the game in the red zone. Are they going unbalanced? Are they taking out the tight end and adding a tackle?”

Overall, though, as with other positions, Van Diest is as concerned about the formations he can use as a counter attack to what his opponent’s offense does behind its line. “We’ll look at their top four or five favorite runs and figure out, with our defensive fronts, how they’ll try to block it,” Van Diest says. “Are they a slide protection team or are they man protection? Are they keeping their tight end in and their back in on certain situations? That always helps us on third down and what defense we want to call. Based on what they do, we’ll see if we want to blitz or if we want to play it safe.”

WIDE RECEIVERS

Teams in the NAIA’s Frontier Conference play wide open football. Many of the teams use a one-back set to use more receivers. Since the conference teams play each other twice during the season, coaches get acclimated to scouting the opponent’s wide receivers. “Our main premise on defense is to stop the run and force the pass,” said Van Diest, “but there are a lot of teams that like that just fine because they’ll throw whether it’s first-and-ten, or third-and-three.”
Therefore, it’s important to know the main receiver, the go-to guy, the receiver they like in clutch situations, and maybe a main receiver at the start of the drive or on third-and-long. “We can look at stats, but sometimes the stat sheets don’t tell everything,” said Van Diest, the NAIA’s football coach of the year in 2005. “Then we look at ability to see how we match up with their receivers playing man-to-man. Or, we’ll see if their team is so good that we need to back off and play zone. So, number one, we’re going to look at personnel. Then, we look and see when they use a two-receiver set or a three-receiver set. Do they move their main guy around a lot to different spots in the formation, or do they leave him one side or the other?”

When Van Diest and his defensive coaching staff break down film, they want to know how often a team passes on first down. Likewise, they see if a team has tendencies when it starts a possession after a turnover or kick. Finally, they breakdown how much a team passes on third down and varying distances.

In the red zone, many teams today with bigger receivers like to run fade routes, particularly against shorter defensive backs. “You’re trying to see as a defensive coach what they’re trying to do with their motion set, and if they’re trying to get you out of a certain set,” said Van Diest. “On the flip side, do we have a tendency too much when we’re down there that they have an idea of what defense we’ll be in? That’s where self-scouting comes into play. We want to try and be more versatile in the red zone with our calls, and not get to a point where we’re so predictable.”

Van Diest adds another tried-and-true football adage, though. Regardless of how much scouting and other preparation he does at whichever position, only one thing counts. “You sometimes can’t match up the way you’d like against certain teams,” he said. “But no matter who’s out there, they still have to make a play.”

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