Auburn Analysis

Yesterday we started our series of preview articles for the impending Auburn football season by looking at the offense, a post which was mainly filled with ennui and depression. Today, we’re going to take a look at the defense, which will feature some guarded optimism for the upcoming season. Auburn’s defense will almost certainly be the strength of this year’s team (as it has been since 2015). However, the loss of Derek Mason (by far Auburn’s most capable assistant coach) to a lateral-at-best move to Oklahoma State, as well as a few notable departures, is cause for concern that there will be at least some drop-off from last year’s relatively competent unit.

STATISTICAL PROFILE

Unlike Auburn’s relatively mediocre offense last season, the 2021 defense was pretty good, although well short of elite. There were some notable high points (the first 59 minutes of the barely-watchable rock fight against Alabama) as well as some dismal low points (the total collapse in the second half of the Mississippi State game).

Statistically, Auburn’s defense checked out relatively well. Although it was a mediocre 62th in total defense, allowing 374.9 YPG, it ranked much higher in scoring defense at 27th, conceding 21.8 PPG. Auburn’s defense against the run was pretty solid, ranking 29th at 129.3 YPG, but it was a dismal 96th against the pass, allowing 245.6 YPG. The discrepancy between the total defense and scoring defense illustrates the bend-don’t-break nature of Derek Mason’s defense, which was often frustrating to watch between the 20s, but usually impressive in the red zone.

The advanced stats were also relatively favorable to Auburn’s 2021 defense, which comes in in 20th place on FEI’s defensive efficiency metric.

However, Auburn’s defense struggled in a couple of notable areas. One, which has been a perpetual bogeyman since 2017, was the pass rush, which ranked a paltry 47th in the nation in sacks; however, this is partially attributable to schematic factors that we’ll get into later in this article. This issue likely played into Auburn’s relatively poor pass defense, since opposing QBs often had plenty of time in the pocket to find the holes in Auburn’s soft zone coverages.

The more glaring issue was takeaways: Auburn ranked 116th in the country in takeaways, averaging less than one takeaway per game (0.9 TPG). Thankfully, Auburn’s offense was relatively good at avoiding turnovers, as we discussed yesterday, so the impact of this was less severe, but knowing that our offense is going to struggle this season, increasing the number of takeaways will be essential to creating scoring opportunities, and it’s an area where Auburn really has to improve.

PERSONNEL

Auburn returns many of the key players from last year’s defensive unit, including its best pass rusher, Derick Hall, and its best linebacker, Owen Pappoe. However, Zakoby McClain, who was the emotional leader of this unit, and Roger McCreary, its primary shutdown corner, are gone, leaving two major holes to be filled. Thankfully, Auburn’s recruiting on the defensive side of the ball has been more resilient than its offensive recruiting during the late stages of the Gus era and the fits and starts of the Harsin era, and it has more proven contributors and fewer question marks and obvious liabilities than the offense does. Let’s take a look at the preseason depth chart.

Defensive Line

Starter: Derick Hall (Sr.), Colby Wooden (Sr.), Jayson Jones (So.), Marquis Burks (Sr.)

Backup: Dylan Brooks (R-Fr.), Morris Joseph, Jr. (Sr.), Marquis Burks, Jeffrey M’Ba (So.)

Auburn’s defensive line is likely to be the strength of this unit. Hall is obviously the team’s best pass rusher, who will be backed up by Dylan Brooks, a highly touted recruit two years ago. Auburn will have plenty of senior leadership in Colby Wooden and Marquis Burks, supplemented by some important transfers in Jayson Jones and Morris Joseph, Jr.

Linebacker:

Starters: Eku Leota (Sr.), Owen Pappoe (Sr.), Cam Riley (So.)

Backups: Marcus Bragg (Sr.), Wesley Steiner (Jr.), Eugene Asante (Jr.)

The linebackers also feature a strong group of experienced upperclassmen in Leota and Pappoe, along with some promising but inexperienced players in Riley and Steiner, as well as a couple of useful transfers to add some depth. Depth is still a concern at this position, given the relative lack of proven contributors and the loss of one of its key players in Zakoby McClain, but barring any injuries (knock on every bit of wood you can find), the linebacking corps should be solid.

Defensive Backs:

Starters: Nehemiah Pritchett (Sr.), Jaylin Simpson (Jr.), Zion Puckett (Jr.), Donovan Kaufman (So.)

Backups: Keionte Scott (So.), DJ James (Jr.), Craig McDonald (So.)/Marquise Gilbert (So.), Cayden Bridges (R-Fr.)

The defensive backfield has been an area of strength for Auburn for several years, and this unit has consistently produced top-tier players who became high NFL draft picks. Thankfully, there are still a couple of players who fit that bill on campus, and Auburn’s cornerback pairing of Nehemiah Pritchett and Jaylin Simpson could stack up with just about any other team in the country. The safeties are less certain, although Zion Puckett has been solid (albeit something of a liability in man coverage) and Kaufman is promising but relatively unproven. The backups consist primarily of interesting young prospects, who have good potential but little experience. I don’t think this unit will be as good as it was last year (no unit would be after losing a player of Roger McCreary’s caliber), but it looks like it should be next man up, at least at corner.

SCHEME

I’m going to be honest, I know far less about the Xs and Os of defense than I do offense, primarily because offense is just more interesting to me. Creation is inherently more compelling than destruction. However, I’m going to attempt a general overview of Auburn’s scheme for those who are unfamiliar with it, and will include at least some degree of defensive breakdowns during the season (although this is often hard to do without all-22 film since the tight angles of TV cameras make it hard to see what’s going on more than 10 yards past the line of scrimmage).

New DC Jeff Schmedding is expected to carry on with a similar scheme to the one used by Derek Mason last year. At one time, Mason was regarded as a true innovator on the defensive side of the ball, as he was basically the only coach in the PAC-12 who could slow down Oregon’s prolific offenses during the Chip Kelly era. He was underwhelming as Vanderbilt’s head coach, but that’s hard to avoid given that it’s, you know, Vanderbilt (let’s just ignore Auburn’s .500 all time record against the Commodores since most of their wins predate color television).

Mason’s scheme that Schmedding has inherited is generally described as an odd front scheme (i.e. one that uses three defensive linemen in its base package rather than four), although I don’t think that’s a great way of classifying defenses anymore, since the spread offense has forced defenses to largely abandon their base 3-4 or 4-3 packages in favor of a variety of nickel and dime sets, and most defenses will use both even and odd fronts depending on the situation. I think it’s more useful to categorize modern defenses as either one-gap or two-gap systems, which is pretty much what it says on the tin: in a one-gap system, defensive linemen are generally responsible for fitting one gap in the run game, while in a two-gap system, they’re responsible for two.

Since many modern defenses also divorce their coverage from the front (following the example of Gary Patterson’s innovations in the early 2000s), coverage is less dependent on the type of front than it used to be. At one time, it was common to categorize defenses as either one-high or two-high coverages, based on the number of safeties, although this was always more diffuse than the base front and most teams used both one-high and two-high looks. That said, Derek Mason’s defense was primarily a one-high setup, often playing a relatively soft cover three (three deep zone defenders), either with four underneath zone defenders, or five underneath zone defenders (the drop 8 coverage that’s become increasingly popular in college football as a way of countering spread offenses), although he would play man free at times (man coverage with only one deep zone defender, the free safety). Auburn did not blitz heavily and its use of pressure packages was highly situational, often focused on high leverage situations (which is common throughout college football).

Both of these aspects of Mason’s system incurred some significant growing pains because of their dissimilarity to Kevin Steele’s system, which the entire defensive roster was built around. Steele based out of a 4-2-5 front (i.e., an even/one-gap system) and Auburn’s base coverage was quarters (with a four-deep shell), probably the most common base coverage in college football today (along with its close relative, two read, popularized by the aforementioned Gary Patterson) because it facilitates pattern matching coverages to combat the more sophisticated passing offenses of the modern era, as well as the increasingly prevalent RPO schemes. It’s worth noting, however, that Steele did use an odd front at times, most notably against LSU in 2019, playing a reduced 3-2 box with six defensive backs to slow down LSU’s pass-heavy attack (which Auburn did more effectively than most other teams LSU faced that season). Since Auburn was changing both its base coverage and its base front, this required some adaptation of the existing personnel since the types of players you recruit, particularly up front, will differ between the two systems (although this is less true in the spread era than it was 15 to 20 years ago, when most teams spent a significant portion of each game in their nominal base front).

There was a good deal of frustration among fans with Mason’s frequent use of soft zone coverage, which modern spread/RPO schemes are designed to exploit by throwing quick passes to receivers who aren’t closely defended, which increased Auburn’s tendency to give up a lot of third and medium to third and long situations (continuing the “third and Auburn” meme of the Steele era). However, as I noted above, Mason’s philosophy was very much a “bend-don’t-break” one, and its focus was mainly to limit explosive plays and force an offense to execute consistently on a long drive, which, as any offensive coach will tell you, is hard to do at any level, but especially in college and below. However, this approach was subject to exploitation by offenses that are built around that type of dink-and-dunk approach, most notably the air raid systems of Mike Leach and his protégé, Dana Holgorsen. Why teams continue to play drop 8 against the air raid is beyond me, since it’s been demonstrated several times that that’s a very bad idea.

In any case, I wouldn’t expect a ton of change from Auburn’s defense from a scheme perspective. I didn’t chart the entire A-Day game (mainly due to the frustration I noted above with using TV camera angles to study defense), but Auburn showed a variety of even and odd fronts, as well as a number of different defensive looks, although the two-gap system with a one-high base was still evident. Of course, the one offense you’re guaranteed to never face in a competitive game is your own, and the inferences you can draw from a spring game are therefore quite limited. However, I think this will be a case of substantial continuity on the defensive side of the ball. I think the loss of Derek Mason and key contributors like McClain and McCreary are valid cause for concern, but I’m certainly more optimistic about the defense than I am the offense, and suspect that Auburn will rely heavily on the defense to keep them in games where the offense struggles to generate much.

This concludes our season preview series (I’m not writing about special teams because come on, nobody is reading a special teams preview). Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at Auburn’s first opponent, the Mercer Bears. This will be the typical format for most game weeks going forward: a film review of the previous game early in the week (with gifs and illustrations rather than a Great Wall of Text like these last two articles), followed by a scouting report on the next opponent later in the week, with additional articles sprinkled in if something catches my interest (whether it’s Auburn-related or another team that’s doing something noteworthy from a scheme perspective).