thanks for sharing, dreamer. this is great stuff. i wish i had kept my spreadsheets, too. ...oh, wait. i never had any. lol. (i'm lazy. just ask my ex wife.)
i definitely agree with you on Hands. never saw where it made a difference in INTs, though i still wonder if it might have factored into passes defended (PD). GI seemed to affect consistency. i felt like the better overall GI my defense had, the fewer big plays they gave up. but again, that could've just been me seeing what i wanted to see.
in thinking about it, Tech may have had the biggest correlation to INTs of anything. but that's not much better than a hunch. of all the murky business of the AI, i'd really like to see the hard logic on how INTs are worked, and coverage in general.
Speed is always good. although i came to believe that (within reason) it didn't carry the level of impact i would've expected, particularly at the CB spots where i encountered more than a few players that seemed to do really well with average or even sub par speed. i suspect that was due to the games all zone/no man coverage. that said, i did find speed made an impact at the true Safety positions. with the 4-2-5 scheme in mind, i treated the CB3 position as another "true" Safety and made sure the starter there had plenty of speed. that probably had no impact on the game, but it fed into my fantasy of being an actual XnOs coach. heh.
as for fumbles, i came to believe that Str was an impact factor. another reason i probably placed more emphasis on Str at the DB positions than maybe other coaches.
my scheduling habits mirrored yours to a decent degree, but our game planning looks to have been pretty different. in my Con approach, i was always hedging my players toward the line of scrimmage in bias to the run. on first down, for example, i set all defense to Run/Con, even typically ND Box. The exceptions were Shotgun, for which i virtually always went with Heavy Pass/VCon, and Wish Bone, which was typically set to Heavy Run/Bal.
even in obvious passing situations, i never went with an Always Pass defense because i felt like that left me too open to the short underneath passes. so Heavy Pass was the most pass bias i ever used. in similar fashion, i never went Always Run. my perception was that doing so was getting me burned by runs to the outside. in my mind, i rationalized it in comparison to the real world where LBs can get
too close to the line of scrimmage and find themselves caught inside battling traffic and without any good attack angles to the ball.
did i mention i coach in the game as if i'm coaching for real? heh.
with that mentality established, i felt like the basic Run/Con approach had my LBs and Safeties close enough to the line of scrimmage to be effective against the run. but with no blitzing going on, and with making sure to have speedy Safeties in place, i was always able to be in position to cover the pass. in evidence of that, i'll say that even with the run bias, i rarely, rarely got beat on a deep throw, and opposing QBs generally did poorly against my defense compared to their season averages. RBs tended to have a little under their average YPC.
**afterthought: dreamer, it just occurred to me you're like the Nickle version of Dick LeBeau to my Dom Capers! think i'll get a tattoo to commemorate ...
** after-afterthought: for anyone interested in the 4-2-5 scheme for reals, check out this site: http://coachhoover.blogspot.com/2011/12/4-2-5.html. TCU's Thunder Concept is a fun look.
gods help me, i love the look of fear and confusion in a QB's eyes.
7/13/2013 12:40 PM (edited)