don brown is doctor blitz

Michigan leads the country in pressure rate [Patrick Barron]

Sponsor Note. If you're in need of a lawyer to incorporate your business, Richard Hoeg is your guy. If you're looking to plant potatoes one day and eat potato salad the next, well, that's going to be a taller order but I think you could probably go to the store.

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Sending a lawyer to the store would not be an efficient use of time and money. Sending Richard Hoeg to draw up contracts for you, though? Yeah. That would be an efficient use of time and money.

Queeg time. Mark Dantonio won't be retiring:

All your jokes about completing the circle have already been made in the replies to that tweet.

Potato alert. Potato? Potato.

[After THE JUMP: Don Brown gets after it]

Got to him. [Bryan Fuller]

While this game didn't lack for some fascinating things to talk (or grumble) about on both sides of the ball, I wanted to give the defense—and particularly coordinator Don Brown—their due for the rush package last Saturday. By the final drive, Iowa was flat-out not blocking fifth rushers, they were so discombobulated by what Michigan was doing. Joel Klatt explains:

How did we get here? Why was it working so well against Iowa in particular? I think I have to start with what each team wants to do.

Don's Defense

The basic precept of the 4-2-5 Cover 1 defense that Don Brown brought from Boston College is you want to be able to play man outside and cover extra gaps with your linemen in order to free up the linebackers for havoc.

As the name suggests, there are two of these LBs to spare, taking into account that together they have to cover (or get to) the running back. Often one linebacker is sent on a blitz. The other is used to guess where the ball is going in reaction to the pressure, to provide extra coverage there. If one is sent on a blitz that's one pass read that's going to be open, but Brown’s philosophy is if you can cover the first two reads by playing tight off the snap and dropping an LB into the 2nd read, there won't be time for a third.

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Ferentz's Offense vs Cover 1

Iowa prefers safe underneath passing to their surehanded receivers, either underneath soft coverage or to their slot receiver running through the linebacker level looking for holes. They keep this open by threatening the seam with their tight end, and using their deep threat receiver to keep the safety occupied.

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In practice it's a lot of crossing routes and dink & dunk, with the defense's overreaction to this opening up big plays to the tight end or deep receiver. It works well with Mesh (just run the #1 receiver across the slot) as a one-two combo. Mesh is to passing what inside zone is to running: it works against everything and it's run by everyone. It's how you play off mesh that determines your identity, and this underneath passing game is Iowa's.

This year the tight end hasn't been much of a threat so they're having him mostly just block the SAM (or Viper in our case) out of the play. Is it OPI? Yeah, probably, but this is the Big Ten.

[After the jump, let them fight]

[Upchurch]

On a day that featured the actualization of the Platonic ideal of a Harbaugh-led offense, a legitimate argument can be made for the defense being the most impressive unit on the field. In other words, Scott Frost, so used to disputed titles, couldn't even find one phase of the game to hang his hat on. Michigan outrushed, outpassed, and, yes, outhit Nebraska en route to their most complete game of the young season.