The Illusion of Complexity: Using Simplicity and Aggressiveness to Manipulate Offenses

Modern football is not about lining up and relying purely on athleticism and technique to defeat opponents (not that it ever was just about that). Today’s offenses have numerous ways of capitalizing on just about any advantage given by a defense. Whether it’s a match-up problem, a hole in a scheme, or just general predictability; if there’s a weakness, a great offense will find it and make you pay for it. I was amazed when I first started coaching at how easily a whiteboard session could end with an apparent victory for the offense. Something as simple as a numbers disadvantage or a spacing problem on defense could be exploited with a few strokes of a marker.

The fact is that as offenses become more innovative, there is increasing pressure on defensive coordinators to come up with answers at the risk of being unprepared. I used to think that the answer was to come up with something to stop everything; drawing up schemes designed to shut down anything opponents might throw at us. The inherent problem with such an approach is that there is no way to ensure correct timing and application of our play calls.How can we possibly know enough about what’s coming to dial up the perfect response? Having such a rigid approach can cause us to be far too reactionary as a defense. Furthermore, we risk our scheme being too complicated for our players to be able to play fast and with confidence on every snap. That is not to say that anticipating offensive strategies and calling the right play isn’t important (on the contrary, it’s essential), but having to play the guessing game and hoping we make the right call or we’ll get burnt isn’t going to get us wins.

We needed a better way to approach things, one that would allow us enough flexibility within the scheme to be versatile and unpredictable, while being easy to teach and to learn. Put simply, we adopted a philosophy that involved simplifying the teaching methods and rules of the defense for the purpose of boosting our players’ understanding of the scheme. We also placed a heavy emphasis on utilizing disguises and unpredictable patterns of play calling to confuse our opponents. The abridged version of the philosophy is that we want to give off an “illusion of complexity.” We want to appear complex to opposing offenses without sacrificing our players’ confidence level or reacting too much to what offenses give us. If we are creative enough with our game plan, we can manipulate opponents into making mistakes and seize momentum by capitalizing on big play opportunities.

There’s no one concrete way of getting this done, but we’ve dedicated ourselves to implementing three principles that help us accomplish what we want. The first is to have basic rules for the defense that are clear, concise and easy to understand. Everything that we teach after our initial install will branch off from these “core principles.” This ensures that our players understand our base defense and how their responsibilities on each play directly impact the greater system.

The next principle we must instill is utilizing disguise concepts to confuse and manipulate our opponents. We can do this by calling a specific disguise and also by designing our defense to accommodate multiple fronts and alignments. Many of our play calls will have a natural element of disguise because we can run most of our blitzes and concepts from any of our defensive fronts. This ensures that the offense will never be able to make assumptions about the pre snap alignments and movements that we show them. If we can force opponents to rely more on guesswork in their play calling, we now have the upper hand because they are now reacting to us rather than the other way around. In addition to being able to manipulate offenses with our alignment, most of our blitzes are designed to be run from either side of our defense. This gives us the flexibility to be able to bring pressure from any side of the offensive formation depending on what we are trying to accomplish without giving anything away. Also, with proper timing and discipline, our players can credibly show blitz from wherever they want and still be able to get to the actual play call after the snap (see diagram).

The final principle of our defensive installation is that we must put less strain on the players and more on ourselves as coaches when it comes to strategy and game planning. All the players need to know are the basic rules of the defense and how they apply to individual play calls. Any play that is drawn up for a specific purpose by the coaches should be easy to understand and execute with confidence, as it will be made up of concepts and techniques that are familiar to our players. The whole point of referring to the complexity of our defense as an “illusion” is because the players should see the system as being simple and easy to learn. As for the coaches who design the system however, it’s no illusion. Putting together a schematically sound defense with concrete rules and principles requires an extremely thorough attention to detail. The defense must be complex to its designers and to opposing offenses, but not on the guys we are asking to make plays for us.

It is important to remember that there’s no one absolutely correct way to do anything in football, as evidenced by the constant evolution of the game. We need to respect that as we go along developing our defense, and continue to find new ways to simplify things for our players while also giving us a competitive advantage against our opponents. There are several tools coaches can employ to accomplish this. The bottom line is that the more we are able to confuse the offense (but not our own players), the less susceptible we are to being reactionary as a defense. Rather, we can be the ones who manipulate our opponents and control the momentum and tempo of the game.