Texas against the dominant defensive tackle: how will Texas deal with Alabama?

Albert Haynesworth has at times been a dominant defensive tackle in the NFL, and so has Vince Wilfork. Ndamukong Suh was a dominant defensive tackle in the Big 12 this season while Terrance Cody dominated the SEC anchoring the middle of the Alabama defense.

This is Haynesworth:


This is Wilfork:

This is Suh:

This is Cody:


Anything stand out? While all of them are enormous men, they have different bodies and subsequently different physical skills. Wilfork is a big space eater who lines up across the center and defends the gaps to either side of the center. Haynesworth is an explosive athlete who attacks the gap between the Right Tackle and Right guard.

We’ll get back to that, first let’s examine some conventional wisdom regarding the Alabama vs. Texas matchup. In 2 games vs. high level defenses Texas won 12-10 and 16-13. In both games, the interior line for the Texas offense was humiliated and Colt McCoy took multiple sacks in each game.
I’d like to highlight the performances of the defensive tackles for Oklahoma and Nebraska in those games.
Gerald McCoy: 3 tackles including 2 for loss. 1 sack and 5 quarterback hurries. You might also remember that his opponent, David Snow, was called for several false starts in a panic trying to deal with him.
For the season McCoy had 31 tackles, including 14.5 for loss and 5 sacks. He created 9 quarterback hurries.

Ndamukong Suh: 12 tackles including 7 for a loss of 22 yards. He had 4.5 sacks and 2 quarterback hurries. On the season he put up 77 tackles, 22 tackles for loss, 11 sacks, one interception, 10 other passes broken up and 22 quarterback hurries.

A few things should stand out here. One is that both Suh and McCoy performed better against Texas than they did against most of the teams on their schedules. McCoy doubled his season’s quarterback hurry output against Texas alone. I have a few explanations for this
1). Chris Hall: He lines up in the center of the Texas offensive line. He completely lacks the necessary strength to stop the momentum of guys like this. He has talents and by all accounts is one of the finest young men at the university. But he is a soft interior lineman.
2). Huey’s ankle: Michael Huey is a much stronger interior lineman but he has had a bum ankle all season. It’s hard to use leverage against 280 pound men with a tender ankle.
3). David Snow’s bizarre regression. Sophomore Snow was expected to emerge as an elite interior lineman that could push the guards and Hall for their starting spots. That hasn’t happened and he looked completely lost against Gerald McCoy.

McCoy, overall, put up half of his quarterback hurries against Texas. The quarterback hurry is an underrated stat that indicates when a lineman is creating pressure on the quarterback that will lead to turnovers and incomplete passes. Gerald McCoy’s 5 quarterback hurries indicate that he was making a dwelling place in the Texas backfield in Dallas.
Suh dominated Texas to the point where nothing could be accomplished offensively because any and every play design was blown up before it could start. The frequent negative plays against Nebraska and OU stalled the Texas drives.

People want to look at these two games as a measure for how Texas will fare offensively against Alabama. It seems reasonable to conclude that since Texas won by 2 and 3 points against the two good defenses they faced (both of which were poor on offense), that an Alabama Team with an even better defense and very solid offense will consequently manhandle the Horns and walk away as champions.

I wanted to apply similar wisdom to the Texas matchup vs. Ohio State last season. Texas had amazing numbers against the run on defense while Ohio State was poor statistically against the pass. Those two bits of knowledge combined seemed to suggest a strong Texas victory. As it turned out, Texas’ front 7 was inexperienced against power running schemes and struggled with the Buckeye running game and containing Terrelle Pryor. Meanwhile, Ohio State gave up 300 passing yards but it required Colt throwing the ball over 45 times to do so and resulted in less than 25 points. That game was a forerunner in dealing with the Texas passing game that was matched in the following two games.

The gameplans used by Nebraska and OU against Texas were markedly different from each other. Nebraska just asked the defensive line to control the game and free up the back 7 defenders to sit on the Texas short passing routes they had mastered from watching game film. Some nice use of pattern reading allowed Nebraska to blow up the simple Texas offense by challenging all of Colt’s comfort reads and the domination by Suh and the D-line killed drives with negative plays.

Oklahoma could have done that as well, besides the somewhat meaningless downgrade from Suh to McCoy they have the best D-line in the conference. However, that would waste all the creative zone-blitzes Brent Venables had been writing on napkins in Oklahoma diners. Instead OU zone-blitzed Texas and rushed Colt into making hasty short throws where, again, the back 7 defenders were more than prepared for simple Texas passing routes.

So, Alabama can just get to McCoy really fast and sit on the short routes while the offense grinds out a methodical 20 points or so en route to an easy 24-9 victory right?
Well, it’s possible but they are missing one big ingredient to achieving that success. Remember those numbers put up by Gerald McCoy and Ndamukong Su over the season? These were the numbers of Alabama’s star defensive tackle Terrance Cody:
25 tackles, 6 tackles for loss, 3 quarterback hurries, 1 pass broken up, 2 blocked kicks.
The only time Cody showed any real explosiveness up the middle was in blocking the field goals that gifted Alabama the victory over Tennessee.

The difference between Cody and Suh or McCoy is similar to the difference between Haynesworth and Wilfork. While McCoy and Suh are frequently facing double teams, like Cody, they aren’t just trying to occupy blockers and keep the line from moving defenders off the ball. They are attacking an interior gap and getting into the backfield. Terrance Cody isn’t getting into the opposing teams’ backfield. He’s occupying a center and a guard so that Rolando McClain or one of Alabama’s other big linebackers can get to the ball unimpeded. At 350+ pounds, Terrance Cody simply isn’t physically built to chase down Colt and disrupt the Texas passing game.

I’ll be back later with detailed analysis of the matchup between the Texas offense and Alabama defense but for now let’s just consider how the easy analysis can overlook the real details in matching up opponents on the gridiron. Nebraska and Oklahoma used different methods but ultimately relied on their dominant DT play to blow up the Texas offense. Alabama doesn’t play that way and while having a tremendously rare and valuable talent in Cody, they don’t have the personnel to get after Texas in the manner that Nebraska and OU did. Take a quick sigh of relief.