Several months in the making, Georgia Tech’s defensive game plan for N.C. State finally gets revealed Saturday.
There will be the basics that always attend defensive coordinator Al Groh’s 3-4 defense, and there will be tweaks.
“We certainly expect different wrinkles because they do it every game,” N.C. State coach Tom O’Brien said. Groh and O’Brien have coached against each other dating to 1978, when they were assistants at Air Force and Navy, respectively, and then in the early to mid ’80s, when Groh was coach at Wake Forest and O’Brien was an offensive assistant at Virginia.
The Yellow Jackets’ defensive scheme doesn’t increase in complexity over the course of the season. It does, however, include adjustments that come in and out on a weekly basis.
“That’s not unusual [to introduce tweaks], but that has always been a real strong suit of Coach Groh’s,” said N.C. State offensive coordinator Dana Bible, who also coached against him when he and O’Brien were at Boston College and Groh was at Virginia.
For Saturday’s win over North Carolina, “there were a couple things that he drew up, a couple of things that we may never see again,” outside linebacker Steven Sylvester said. “It just kind of goes week to week.”
Among the looks that the Jackets showed the Tar Heels was the “radar” front, in which none of the linemen or linebackers took a three-point stance as they variously feinted blitzes and swapped positions before a third-down snap in the second quarter. It confused North Carolina, causing a false start and forcing the Tar Heels to use a timeout.
This week, the challenge appears to rest in stopping Wolfpack quarterback Mike Glennon, who has replaced All-ACC quarterback Russell Wilson. Groh said that Glennon probably has the strongest arm in the ACC.
Glennon averages 269.8 yards per game and has thrown 10 touchdown passes against three interceptions. His older brother, Sean, is best remembered by Tech fans as the Virginia Tech quarterback whose jersey disappeared before a Hokies-Jackets game in 2007.
Scheme aside, the Jackets would do well to hone the basics. Against North Carolina, missed tackles and problems with pre-snap communication and alignment enabled the Tar Heels to chew up the Jackets with five plays of 20 yards or more and to score touchdowns on all three red-zone trips. While it improved slightly Saturday, Tech’s defensive third-down conversion rate of 46.4 percent is 96th out of 120 FBS (formerly Division I-A) teams.
To prepare for N.C. State and their 11 other opponents, Groh and the defensive staff began forming what he called “a pretty good long-range scouting report” weeks after last season ended to develop a plan for each game and build the playbook accordingly. The plans provided direction for practices in the spring and again in August. Schemes or plays taught in camp lay dormant until the appropriate week.
“What we put in depends to a degree on who we’re playing,” Groh said. “You have to play a different kind of game every week.”
