You need to recruit people who are going to have a minimum final Defense Rating of at least 50. ATH is also very important to overall Defense.
If you look at he DEF and ATH ratings of the best teams in your conference or the world, you should be able to see a good target range for overall team DEF and ATH.
But, if you want to win and if you want to press, you have to have good ATH and DEF. Read the
Winning at D2/D3 thread. Did I say DEF and ATH enough?