By LARRY VAUGHT
Kentucky likely is going to need help from true freshmen receivers and running backs this season. Two years ago the Wildcats even turned to true freshman quarterback Morgan Newton when starter Mike Hartline was injured and lost for the season.
But will new defensive coordinator Rick Minter rely on any true freshmen to bolster his new, more aggressive UK defense that will rely on much more blitzing?
“It would be a challenge to be honest with you, but in the first year no matter who you are playing with, freshmen or seniors, it is a challenge,†said Minter. “Second, third (years) and on down the road gets easier. Marshall and Note Dame, my last two stops (in Division I), it took time before things started to flow and fall in place. My second year at Marshall we climbed into the top two or three defenses in Conference USA and played extremely well
“But we are not talking about the future. We are talking about now. What we have to make work now is that we have got experience. We have older guys who should be physically developed and mentally capable of learning new things. We have 10 seniors on defense and what I tried to sell them on is fast forward your life and if you have aspirations to play at the next level (NFL) you are going to be thrown a playbook that looks just about like ours and told to learn it in about four weeks.â€Â
Minter says he is challenging his older players, who he knows have NFL aspirations, to use his playbook/style as a way to measure how they could do in a NFL training camp.
“Use that as a test. If you really want to play at the next level, use this as a test to the finish line of your four- or five-year college career. Don’t coast. Accelerate in your last year and put the hammer down and hopefully it makes us better, too, and will make you better,†Minter said.
“One year from now, guess what.  You are going to be asked to do that again. If you want to play at the next level, you are going to be asked to learn that again. That’s the silver lining for those guys that they have been tested and taught a bunch of new things and now their bank of knowledge is that much broader.
“If there are three or four teams they happened to get looked at, it could be guys that our system really is patterned after whether it be the Ravens, the Jets, the Steelers. A lot of their packages and concepts are in our playbook.â€Â
That’s why it’s so hard for a freshman to adopt to his system.
“It could happen with a freshman, but it’s not easy on them,†Minter said. “I am going to play the best guys we have, but they also have to know what they are doing.â€Â
22 Responses to True freshmen may have trouble playing in Minter’s system
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Why would UK football need offensive and defensive systems that are so complex that incoming freshmen are not smart or quick enough to learn it and play. Yet, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, LSU, and others seem to get significant freshman contributions for their teams.
I have asked this question before, and the predominant answer focuses on the complexity of the systems.
So, is this more to do with the relatively quality of incoming freshmen at UK as compared to these other schools, or is it strictly a matter of system complexities?
When I read an article like this one, my reaction is to believe that the coaches are trying to reduce pre-season fan expectations, and that makes me uneasy as a long standing UK football fan.
Look at it this way. Steve Brown was criticized for running a defense that was too simplified and too unable to adapt. OTOH, Minter’s defensive scheme is designed to be versatile and adaptable. Minter’s system will be harder to analyze and attack.
So if Brown could be criticized for running a simplistic scheme, I suppose some will criticize Minter for opposite reasons. Joker is just trying to maximize performance and become more effective in limiting SEC opponents. We can all agree that defens has not been UK’s strongest suit the last couple of years. It’s time to try something else.
With that being said, I think Minter is correct that freshmen will have a tough time adapting. This will be hardest for the linemen and linebackers. I am convinced one or two true freshman DBs will play this fall, definitely including Faulkner.
I don’t agree with that at all. The defense was not the strongest part of UK’s game last year, but the defense was the mainstay for the team in 2009 and 2008. In those years, it was the offense that could not seem to get going with any consistency. Last year, the offense was strong, but the defense allowed over 28 ppg, a substantial increase from the 2008 and 2009 defensive results.
When you have above average players and a lot of them, a basic defense can work. In 08 and 09 UK had better defensive players than we had in the past. Our D was good but not great. Kentucky isn’t going to always have the best players or above average Defensive guys. It only makes sense that to compensate you try and out scheme the other teams offense. Thus it’s got to be complicated.
Freshman can come and play offense(running back-wide reciever-special teams) However to step in and play defense maybe 4 and 5 star kids can and i say maybe.The professor mentioned other SEC schools and their freshmen however i suspect most are RS freshmen and the others are 4 & 5 star players. We must have a complicated defense it is to our advantage over fast sec offenses. We are short on 4 and 5 star players so we must try Minter style defense to compensate–it is up to our guys to study and apply. I for one am glad Joker has brought him in and we shall see.
I’m ready for some football in the Bluegrass”
Lori, I think you nailed it pretty good. the defense is really a lot more complex. Going to be so interesting to see how this pans out. Defense has experience and even a bit of a swagger going into the year. Hope it is justified.
No real word on Crawford. We should find out Friday. Same about status for rumph and Cobble. got to have the horses up front or it won’t matter what defense UK is using
From what I saw of Minter today in the women’s clinic, I think the complexity lies in the number of variations to the base 4-3/occasional nickel defense along with the pro-style 3-4 defense that is likely to become the predominant defense over time. Maybe I haven’t understood it as well before, but it seemed like there were 257 (not literally, of course) possible combinations and variations that a player would need to know. He did say they have 400 signals that the coaches and players need to learn. While that may be a good thing for confounding opposing offenses, it won’t be so good if it confounds your own players, too.
Seems like it will be tougher on these freshmen and maybe next year’s, but when his system becomes more of a known quantity, maybe it won’t seem so difficult.
Prof- We will have fresh contributorsthis season, more so than yrs past. Mess is right, we needed a change. Case you haven’t noticed we don’t have to many 4 or 5 star guys. That’s about to change. Personally, I can’t wait to see a Jets, Steelers type of D.
I agreee Joe, wait till Nov, several “UK” fans will be eating crow.
When implementing a new system on D involves learning a different playbook, there will always be complexties involved. I think the D will be fine. Larry, any word on DT Mark Crawford? Still in the doghouse?
Steve Brown ran a very basic, simplistic defense, and yet, players were constantly out of position, took bad angles, and whiffed on tackles.
Rick Minter runs a very sophisticated, complex defense, and yet, I predict that his players will be in the right place at the right time and make tackles.
Same players, different coach. Some guys can teach and communicate what they want and some guys can’t.
Nothing wrong with more complicated as long as players can learn it  AND TACKLE. Good tackling simplifies a lot of the woes the UK defense has had
I agree with what Messenger said overall, but I hope we don’t get so complicated we outfox our ownselves on the football field. With that said, with any new defense there is a learning curve and we will see it for the first few games. Hopefully the kinks will get worked out before we turn to the SEC competition rolls into town.
But I for one am tired of seeing us always playing on our heels waiting for the opposing offense coming to us. I would love for UK to have a defense that is as hardnosed as the Steelers or as tough as the Ravens can be. We put up that type of fight on defense everygame lookout everyone.
I don’t think we should be concerned with running a very aggressive style defense. For example= Mississsippi State. Every defense can be vulnerable to the big play for many reasons, but an aggressive defense sets a tone in a game (i.e., we are gunna beat the snot out of you!) as oppossed to a ‘bend but not break’ system. In honor of Jerry Claiborne’s old ‘WIDE TACKLE SIX’ aggressive style, hooray for aggression on the D side of the ball. VICTORY is coming! Victory is here.
We are gonna need Cobble, Rumph and Crawford to compete in the SEC esp when it comes to depth!! Each of those guys is 300+ and that is very imp to have in the SEC!! Work your Magic Coach Minter!!
There will not be a shortage of DTs. There WILL be a serious lack of D-1 level experience in the 2011 DT rotation. (BTW, the same can be said about the RB rotation.)
Andy raised an important variable. Some coaches are more skilled teachers than others. Whatever people may think, Steve Brown is a skilled secondary coach. But Brown may have “Peter-principled” out if at the coordinator level. The “Peter principle” says people keep getting promoted until they finally reach a level of incompetence. Brown was not an incompetent coordinator, but he was not clever and innovative enough to succeed in the nation’s most competitive D-1 football conference. He was not the right man to lead UK’s defense at this stage of the program’s development.
Finally, I respectfully disagree with the suggestion that Minter’s defensive scheme is too complicated. Yes, it is more complcated than Brown’s. But, clearly, it WAS time for a change. We can quibble about numbers. But if you look at SEC defensive stats from recent years, UK’s defense was not getting the job done in SEC play. Even in 2008, the defense played well against Bama in September but softened significantly during the season’s home stretch. Many SEC programs use very complicated defensive systems. Bama, LSU, Florida, and South Carolina are very clear examples, but you can really throw most of the SEC into this. And this is where a peculiar paradox may exist in some corners of the fan base. Everyone wants UK to win more SEC football games. Is everyone ready now for the aggressive steps this will take? If Bama’s and LSU’s defensive units can use complicated schemes succesfully, why can’t UK’s? The roster improves with every successive recruiting class. Now the schemes and game planning must improve. And they will.
I agree Messenger the defensive schemes will be as complicated as the young men on defense can handle. With a new defense everyone is a little apprehensive on how it is gonna turn out. But everyone is right, we have a lot of returning players on defense and that equates to alot of experience playing experience on the field. That matters. Add that with Minter’s new defense hopefully we get a serious upgrade across the board.
OMG, Larry — AND TACKLE is right!!!!!!!!! Someone should have asked Coach Minter about that yesterday at the women’s clinic. Anthony White told me on Sunday Morning Sports Talk that open-field tackling is harder than it looks and I believe him, but it CANNOT be as hard as the Wildcats have made it look recently! OK, off my soap box now. TACKLING, people, JUST KNOCK THE GUY ON HIS BUTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OK, I’m really off the soap box this time.
Lori, the same thought had crossed my mind at the clinic. I love the new defense’s unpredictabiliy and the potential advantage of all the combinations (and it had been SO nice to meet you, and I really look forward to your report here), but I, too, had begun hoping our own players would not sometimes be “confounded,” as you called it here, along with our opponents. Coach Minter makes it clear here that his defense had only started excelling in his second year at Marshall. As I see it, our defense will progress as our players better learn the system.
As a real positive, based on everything we’ve been reading, our players have really been studying film on the new scheme this summer. On the other hand, Coach Minter shared with me that he won’t know just how much they have been studying and grasping what they need to know until practices begin. By the way, I had already been very impressed with this man’s dedication to making our defense better, the time he has been giving to just that, and I really came away impressed with both his defensive mind and his capability as a teacher. Again, how I look forward to seeing our Cats in action!!!
Sound tackling requires, among other factors, being in the right position to make a tackle. When a defensive player is out of position, the result can look like bad tackling when the actual problem was a blown assignment. This has happened numerous times to UK’s defensive unit in recent seasons. I’m not necessarily saying Coach Minter has all the answers. I hope so, but we won’t know that until the rubber hits the road. I AM saying it was time for a change. We all know Joker had to try something different, and Minter is an interesting choice for a lot of reasons. I think UK’s players can handle a complex defensive scheme as well as any other SEC defense can.
Re: Tackling — Another point brought out at the women’s clinic (by Ben Oldham, an SEC official) was the emphasis on contact with the head. He said that tackling below the waist has gotten very limited, even more so this year, and more contact with the head is an unintended consequence. As that receives more attention, there won’t be many places one guy can tackle the other.
IMHO, that means players are either going to focus more and tackle better or they’re going to be so focused on hitting the guy in the right place (or not hitting him in the wrong place, as the case may be) that they’re going to miss him completely.
Good point above, Messenger. I may have been too hasty in my judgment of poor tackling.
Got some great stuff on the women’s clinic coming from Lori Metcalf and Susan Tyler