New defensive terminology among changes for Colorado in spring camp

BOULDER — Colorado’s spring football season got underway Monday and Karl Dorrell’s staff spent the first half of the offseason in the lab cooking up some ideas.

New defensive coordinator Chris Wilson said last week that the defense was undergoing some pretty big changes. Gone are the days of the base 3-4 or base 4-3 defense. Instead, Colorado plans to fit its defense to its opponent on a week-to-week basis.

On Monday, Dorrell said that the defense was changing its terminology. The previous terminology was implemented by Mel Tucker and Tyson Summers when they took over as head coach and defensive coordinator in 2019. Neither is still with the team.

“That’s a learning curve,” Dorrell said of the change. “Even though we’ve had ‘football school’ and they’ve learned it and they understood it from a meeting room setting, now they’ve got to go out and perform it.”

Dorrell doesn’t have a set playbook that he’s trying to implement. Instead, he’s trying to challenge his team to learn as much as they can and create “as big a system as we can.”

“We’re gonna continue to try to push the envelope with them with their knowledge just like any good program,” Dorrell said. “We’re not going to just make it purely vanilla. We’re gonna have them stress themselves to challenge their mental makeup.”

This may sound like a lot to put on a bunch of student-athletes but, in the end, simplicity is the goal.

The previous defense, which was a version of the Nick Saban defense, was implemented by Tucker and Summers. The idea is to tailor the defense to what the offense is doing. Before the snap on every play the middle linebacker and free safety go through a mental checklist to determine where exactly everybody lines up. For example, an outside linebacker may line up differently if there are tight ends on both sides of the formation, rather than just one.

“We’re trying to take a lot of the adjustments that usually happen in the defense we’ve done for the last couple of years and we’ve tried to simplify those and really let our guys just play and run and go,” Dorrell said.

The other change that Dorrell and his staff are making is to place an emphasis on using players to the best of their ability.

Sounds like common sense, right? Well, it isn’t always so simple.

Wilson is spending more time evaluating his own players and making to ensure that, first of all, the best players are on the field in critical moments and, second, that they’re used to their strengths.

Take the inside linebacker position, for example. Nate Landman is locked into one spot but his partner is yet to be chosen. Jon Van Diest brings the most experience to the table, while younger players like Mister Williams, Marvin Ham and Quinn Perry could challenge him. Robert Barnes, who transferred to Colorado from Oklahoma this offseason, is the most likely challenger.

Barnes was a safety in high school but put on some weight and switched to linebacker. As a former safety, his coverage skills should be very good for a linebacker.

Van Diest, meanwhile, is a tackle-first linebacker.

So, instead of choosing just one, why not rotate them based on the situation?

“We’re trying to get a lot of looks for a lot of different guys and make a good assessment at the linebacker positions,” Dorrell said. “We try to figure out what their skillset is, what are they really good, what are the things that we want to get our guys in position to do that they’re capable of performing.”

When all is said and done, Dorrell said that he’s trying to find three or four guys who can fill the linebacker role.

But there’s more.

What if you’re playing an offense that pounds the rock behind heavy personnel?

Well, you start by playing the best run-stopper at linebacker, which very well could be Van Diest, but then you put Barnes in the STAR position. While Barnes may not be a great run-stopper from the inside linebacker position, he’d be a stellar run-stopper from the STAR position, which is often played by safeties and cornerbacks.

“We have him at the (dime linebacker) position ring now but we know he can play outside and in the alleys as well,” Dorrell. “He has the versatility to be in a number of those positions.”

Versatility is what Dorrell is looking for from his players and from his schemes, and that’s true on the offensive side as well.

Dorrell said that he thought last year’s offense was a little “bland in terms of motion and shifts” so he and his staff spiced it up and spent the offseason teaching the team about the tweaks.

Those tweaks were on display Monday. Dorrell said the offense handled them well and that the defense was able to keep up.

“We’re trying to address the things we’re trying to get better at, that we didn’t show as much last year,” Dorrell said. “It was a good start for that.”