The Jackal wrote: ↑Thu Sep 12, 2024 9:54 pm
Stetson does not appear to list a depth chart, so I went and watched a bit of their Warner game.
Defensively, they are in a 3 man front. They started off with 5 DBs on the field off the jump, so their base defense looks something between a 3-4 and 3-3-5. Given their roster, I would call it maybe 3 DL, 3 LBs, and 3 safeties.
Their defense has a couple of guys that look like they are SoCon players. The DE (#5) is listed at 6'4 287. Their MLB (#11) is 6'2 226.
As you might expect, up front a lot of their guys are sort of "tweeners" - They may have length but not weight, or weight but not length.
Offensively, they run out of the spread in what I would call an "air raid." They truly try to spread you out, with wide splits between the offensive linemen, and wide receivers split out from numbers to numbers. Even the backs will often set up spread out from the QB. They are going to try to have you defend all of the horizontal and vertical space on the field.
The QB, Meitz (#9) is listed at 6'1 185. He's got a decent arm, but seems to telegraph where he wants to throw it. Warner was able to jump some of their receivers routes. They also got pretty good pressure on him just rushing four.
A few takeaways:
1. I think Furman is going to have the better athletes, particularly defensively. Stetson's offense at times struggled against a defense that isn't near the quality of ours.
Our DBs are going to have to come up and play physical on the edges. We'll get pressure on the QB, so I suspect they'll be trying to get the ball horizontal quickly.
2. We're going to have to run the ball. Stetson's defense has a couple of dudes on it that play hard. We should have size and speed advantage up front.
My general read is that Stetson almost prefers for you to try to spread them out so they can use their three safety look to drop guys in and out of coverages to create unique looks. Warner tried to combat that by brining multiple TEs and playing tighter sets (what Hendrix might call "playing in a phone booth"). This put Stetson in more of a traditional 3-4 look and took away some of their blitz packages.
At bottom, they are one of these spread teams that likes playing in space on both sides of the ball. I think Furman is going to want to force them to play hard nosed football between the tackles.