Bison137
Professor
Posts: 16147
Reg: 01-23-06
|
01-04-20 08:55 PM - Post#295984
In response to Old Bison
ND is going to have to break another long held philosophy (which Paulsen never did) of playing 100% MTM. Not going to be able to do that going 6-7 deep. Need to play Spear over AT and start using Rhoades (offense be damned) in the PL. Some hard choices need to be made.
Agree on the above. One thing that is very puzzling is that ND in the first half of his first year played a fair amount of match-up zone, something he said he liked when he first arrived. Then midway through the year he completely abandoned it, perhaps when Nate Jones got hurt, and only used it at the end of the year vs West Virginia. And he has never used it since. It is a good defense to use at times, and history has shown that many PL teams use zones to good effect vs certain other teams.
The Bison defense this year has generally been awful - currently ranking about 280th in the nation. I think you have to go back to at least the 1993-94 season to find a worse performance at the defensive end. One issue, as you have noted before, is the automatic switches that make it easy for the opponent to end up with Toomer or Sotos defending their big man near the basket. Colgate in the championship game last year strategically used this Bison trait and ended up with Kimbal or Sotos guarding Ivanauskas and Rayman on multiple occasions. Langel ran plays to create those switches.
|
