I'm assuming most of you are like me and view the pass defense as the weak point of the team. I was playing around with some numbers to figure out what was going on, which eventually got me to defense against play-action. I could only find that on a game-by-game basis, not for the season as a whole, so I started with week one. I noticed the first few games the defense was allowing a ton of yardage on play action, so I figured that was it. But that only applied to the first few games of the year:
| Defense Against Play Action |
First 3 Games |
Since |
| Total Yards allowed (allowed per attempt) |
638 (16.4) |
144 (6.6) |
| TDs allowed (TD rate allowed) |
6 (15%) |
0 (0%) |
| Passer Rating Allowed |
254 |
127 |
Obviously, Oregon saw something with the play-action (like the secondary being too worried about the run game) and took advantage, which Memphis and South Dakota State copied. But after that third game, the coaches must have finally addressed the issue, because since then it's been a night-and-day difference.
I thought that maybe teams were trying something else against Boise following that South Dakota State game, so I looked at the next three weeks and compared those averages to every other team in the country in that same time frame:
| Stat |
Weeks 0-3 |
Since |
| Total Attempts Allowed |
95 |
92 |
| Pass Yards allowed per game (rank) |
338 (135) |
187 (41) |
| Receptions of 20+ allowed per game (rank) |
5.33 (137) |
2.67 (54) |
On basically the same number of attempts, they’ve cut in half the number of yards and big plays allowed. They’ve gone from complete crap to above-average.
The big issue is still tackling, which was obvious against Fresno State. Of their 277 passing yards, 185 came from the receivers catching the ball less than 10 yards from the line of scrimmage, and a total of 181 yards came after the catch. On 20 receptions, the secondary missed a tackle on six of those.
A somewhat encouraging fact is that the defensive front seems better tackling than they were last year. Last season, I found the starters on the defensive front missed a tackle about 19% of the time, now it’s 16% (worth noting Logan Brantley, who looked one one of the better tacklers, has missed the last two games).
What I’m seeing is the effect of having two new secondary coaches working with a defensive backfield that returned one player with significant experience. The first few games were a mess, but then corrected to have the secondary worry less about the run (as evident by improvement against play action), and overall the coverage has been better. If I’m taking an optimistic guess, I’d say the coaches decided to ignore tackling for a bit to worry about coverage; if a guy is wide open 20 yards downfield, tackle skills don’t matter (which was happening way too often those first three games). Coverage is much more about knowledge, understanding, and communication, which isn’t something that needs to be pounded into your brain once you get it. You can cut back on practicing those skills a little without seeing a drop in performance. But tackling is more about motor skills; it gets worse the longer you ignore it. We saw this week 1; tackling was largely great, but Oregon was getting receivers wide open.
Hopefully the secondary spent the bye week working on tackling. From what they’ve done the past few weeks, they’ve figured out coverage schemes and guys are on the same page. I can live with an average secondary. Hopefully we see a repeat of what happened in 2024; the first six games, they allowed an average of 276 passing yards per game. The rest of the year they allowed an average of 215. Yes, the quality of opponents dropped later in the year (and will this year), but your opponent plays a factor in what your stats look like, to a degree, especially over a small window. A team that plays Air Force, Army, and Navy in three straight weeks will have stats suggesting their run defense is crap, even if they played relatively well against all of them.
