10. The defense must recover an average of two and one-half fumbles per game.
These 10 basic axioms are extremely important, and must be applied if a team is to be sound defensively.
Defense—A Team Proposition
A good sound defense is one that has every player on defense carrying out his assignment. Then it is impossible for the offense to score. Note that I said every player, which makes defense a team proposition and eliminates the individual defensive play. By this I mean every defense is coordinated and a player just doesn’t do what he wants to do. I do not mean suppressing an individual’s initiative or desire to excel while on defense, as long as the entire defense is a coordinated unit. We try to instill in every boy that he is personally responsible to see that our opposition does not score. When individual players and a team accept this responsibility, I feel we are making progress and beginning to build a winner.
Gang Tackling—A Defensive Must
During all phases of our defensive work we elaborate frequently on the importance of gang tackling. We like to see six or seven of our boys in on every tackle. Such tactics are not only demoralizing to ball carriers and wear them down physically, but represent sound football. It is difficult for the ball carrier to break loose and score when half a dozen men are fighting to get a piece of him.
We want the first tackler to get a good shot at the ball carrier, making certain he does not miss him. We want the other defenders to “tackle the ball,” and make the ball carrier fumble it so we can get possession of the football. We are trying to get possession of the football any way we can. Frankly we want the first man to the ball carrier merely to hold him up, and not let him get away, so we can unload on him. You can punish a ball carrier when one man has him “dangling,” and the others gang tackle him hard. I am not implying we want our boys to pile on and play dirty football merely to get a ball carrier out of the game. First, we do not teach this type of football as it is a violation of the rules and spirit of the game. Second, piling on brings a 15-yard penalty. We cannot win when we get penalized in clutch situations.
OUR DEFENSIVE NUMBERING SYSTEM AND TERMINOLOGY
After coaching for a number of years, and always trying to find something that would make football easier to understand for the average player, I came upon a system of defensive numbering that has proven very valuable to me since then. In the past I have used many different defenses. I always employed the technique of giving each defense a name. Most of the time the name had little in common with the defense, and this confused, rather than helped, the players. After discussing the possibility of the numbering system with my own and other college and high school coaches, while at Texas A & M in 1956 I finally come across a feasible plan for numbering defensive alignments. I must give credit to O. A. “Bum” Phillips, a Texas high school coach, for helping work out the solution as he experimented with the numbering system with his high school football team.
In the numbering of our defense now, we give each offensive man a number, as well as the gaps between the offensive linemen. [Figure 1] is an example of our defensive numbering system.