Monday Morning QB: The Defense Never Rests

A guest columnist closes down the 2011 season for the Monday Morning Quarterback. Michael Felder, a member of the University of North Carolina football team from 2003 through 2005, talks about the primacy and centrality of defense in college football, countering Mike Gundy's argument that a 39-36 game is better than a 9-6 game.

MICHAEL FELDER is editor-in-chief of InTheBleachers.net, where he writes about the college football world from all angles and runs an award winning podcast. In addition to In The Bleachers, Felder, a former UNC defensive back, can be heard on various radio stations across the country, found on CrystalBallRun.com, and of course on Twitter talking college football and more.

Follow Michael Felder's college football coverage on Twitter: twitter.com/InTheBleachers

We have all heard the old adage “offense wins games, defense wins championships” in regard to what separates the good from the great. We have watched this time-honored truth play out over the previous five seasons as the nation’s best defensive league, the Southeastern Conference, produced five straight national champions. Over the past three years, offensive battleships of Oklahoma (in the 2009 game) and Oregon (2011) were sunk on the way to putting another title in the SEC’s coffers.

This season is no different from that standpoint; the SEC has its sixth straight BCS championship neatly packaged inside a box of suffocating defense. The question this year is more “which” than “can,” as the country’s two best defenses are set to square off in New Orleans. It’s only a matter of whether LSU or Alabama boasts the defense which will lift the crystal trophy in the Superdome. It would seem that the old maxim about defense and championships holds true yet again.

Why is it, then, that the words “defense wins championships” seem to be routinely tested to the point where they are boldly ignored by so many who observe college football, either as a profession or as a pleasurable activity? Fans who want to see their team be “exciting” on the offensive side of the ball are guilty of this. So are coaches who think if they just score more they can win the big one. The same holds true for administrators who look to “put butts in seats” by hiring a flashy offensive system. Media members are guilty of this same bias when they vote for the point machine because it excites them over and against the defensive juggernaut that snuffs out opponents’ advances.

One would think that after seeing Florida hold the dazzling Oklahoma offense to just 14 points in the 2009 BCS title game in Miami, defense would have become even more paramount to any team intent on finding the formula for realizing its championship aspirations. When the nation then watched Auburn mangle Oregon’s offensive line and limit the Ducks to just 19 points this past January, one would have thought that playing defense would become job one at more programs across the country.

Yet, as we look around the country at the most recent round of coaching hires, we see Mike Leach, Larry Fedora, and Kevin Sumlin taking the lead at Washington State, North Carolina, and Texas A&M respectively. Now, in Washington State’s defense, the school is an “outpost” in the college football world, a place where a different type of approach is required to get kids excited to play football and where some lesser pieces must be creatively used to max out.

At North Carolina there’s no such excuse: The fan base in Chapel Hill has grown weary of the pro-styled attack of coordinator John Shoop and is looking to just score more, to be exciting for the sake of being exciting. Bubba Cunningham, the school’s new athletic director, was happy to oblige: His coaching search centered around reinvigorating Tar Heel fans by finding an offense-minded, point-scoring coach to help fill the seats in the new Blue Zone in Kenan Stadium.

With Texas A&M and Kevin Sumlin, the drawing card is to thrill a fan base that is making a monumental move for the 2012 season into the SEC, and more specifically, the same SEC division that houses the last three BCS champions. The SEC West also boasts one team, be it Alabama or LSU, that will wind up winning two BCS titles in the past five seasons on the strength of its defensive prowess. Even with this knowledge at their disposal, the Aggies elected to stay the offensive course and follow the thought process of their soon-to-be-former conference, the Big 12.

Speaking of the Big 12, this conference – for all of its offensive firepower – must look back to Texas in 2005, a team with a once-in-a-generation talent at quarterback and a defense that surrendered just 16.4 points a game, for its most recent BCS championship.. The offenses in this league do win games; four teams finished in the BCS top 14 this season. Three of those four, Oklahoma State, Baylor and Oklahoma, are ranked in the top ten in scoring offenses this year. There are points aplenty in the Big 12, especially from those same four teams in the BCS top 14; Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Baylor and Oklahoma prove this point, finishing 61st, 71st, 109th and 37th when it comes to giving up points to the opposition. A veritable “give and give” of points is at work here; as long as you do not give your opponents more points than they give back to you, your team is doing all right.

The Big 12 has subscribed to the “win games” and “sell tickets” portions of the mantra, but the league’s ignorance of the “defense wins championships” clause suggests that the focus on selling tickets has been excessive. The Big 12 has pursued excitement to a fault, as the Oklahoma State Cowboys are preparing to head west to Arizona for the Fiesta Bowl instead of Southeast for the BCS championship game. This excitement meme is so pervasive in the conference that the Pokes’ head coach, Mike Gundy, used the idea of offensive firepower to try and politick his team’s way into the title game.

The Big 12’s cultural embrace of offense is not exactly surprising: The league used its offenses to both their own advantage and disadvantage all season. As LSU and Alabama slugged it out in that 9-6 game Gundy referenced, the Pokes and Kansas State were putting up 97 combined points in a dazzling display of missed tackles, blown coverages, and all around nonexistent defense. It was just a day in the life of the Big 12, as we saw two weeks before in Oklahoma’s lackluster defensive effort, particularly from the back end, against Texas Tech in Norman. Oklahoma’s inept secondary ended all hopes of the 11-0 vs. 11-0 Bedlam game many expected to see when this season hit the midway point.

But offense sure sells those tickets – just ask Baylor, who had a packed house to watch Robert Griffin III put up 551 yards of offense and six total touchdowns against Oklahoma in a 45-38 Bears upset of the Sooners. Over 1,200 yards of combined offense crammed the stat sheet as the two squads lit up the scoreboard in Waco. Speaking of tickets, just the night before Baylor’s shocker – Friday, November 18 – another wild Big 12 donnybrook unfolded in a packed Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa. The nation saw the reason Gundy’s team is not playing for a national championship: a 37-31 loss to Iowa State. In that game, Oklahoma State’s defensive unit surrendered 568 yards of offense to the Cyclones.

The common thread of these three Big XII upsets? Defense, or better stated, a lack thereof.

However, this is not an SEC versus Big 12 problem; it’s bigger than that. Just look at the sixth-ranked Razorbacks and their defensive woes to discover why Bobby Petrino’s team is the odd man out in the SEC West. Tied with Oklahoma for 37th in scoring defense, the Hogs were ninth in the SEC in scoring defense… and ended the season 10-2 for the second year in a row. Unlike a season ago, when Auburn outscored the Hogs 65-43 and Alabama outlasted Arkansas 24-20, the Razorbacks’ 2011 losses were devastating blowouts by 24 points at the hands of Alabama and LSU.

While Arkansas’ offense struggled to get going against the suffocating defenses of the Tide and the Bayou Bengals, the Hogs’ defense was giving up points and yardage. Games that demanded a monumental defensive effort from Arkansas – to allow the offense to get on track – turned into blowouts because the defense did not show up. If the Hogs could merely get some small semblance of defense to go with that offense, who knows how things shake out when their high powered offense goes into an end-game scenario with Tyler Wilson captaining the ship. Yet, without defense you never get to that point. Petrino has taken a step by hiring Paul Haynes as the Razorbacks’ new defensive coordinator. Haynes comes from Ohio State, a place where defense is a non-negotiable. Hopefully for Arkansas fans, he can create a new and improved identity for the Razorbacks’ defensive unit, which has lived as an afterthought thanks to Petrino’s offensive show.

Moving through the college football landscape, the ACC Championship Game showed two teams on very different paths, but the ultimate determinant of the champion was which team’s defense showed up in Charlotte. Virginia Tech finished second in the ACC this season, but on December 3, its defense was not able to muster the effort the Hokies were used to getting all season. Clemson did get a top-flight defensive effort out of a unit that finished eighth in the ACC in total defense and ninth in the conference in scoring. A defense that gave up 31, 37 and 34 points in its losses was able to hold the Hokies to just ten points.

In the Big Ten, Wisconsin’s power offense sold the tickets while the Badgers’ defense put them in the hunt for the Rose Bowl. Montee Ball and Russell Wilson were the stories of the year in the Midwest, as the Heisman finalist at running back and the newcomer at quarterback opened up the Badgers’ offense. They lit up the scoreboard to the tune of 45 points a game. At 11-2 the Badgers’ offense has played well enough on the merits to keep them in the BCS championship hunt, but their defense has kept them out of that discussion. Although ten games have seen opponents put up just seventeen or few points against UW, it is Bret Bielema’s 1-2 record in games where teams score more than 30 points this season that has him headed to Pasadena and not New Orleans.

Wisconsin is not exactly the same case as Oklahoma State or Baylor, teams with flat-out bad defenses. No, the Badgers are a team with a glaring weakness that both Ohio State and Michigan State (twice) exploited on the way to piling up points and beating Bucky. That weakness was perimeter defense in both the run and the passing game. An inability to play sideline to sideline while maintaining the vertical integrity of pass coverage has characterized this Wisconsin team. While moments - such as those found early in the Nebraska game – shed light on their vulnerability, it took Sparty and the Buckeyes repeatedly hammering at the weakness to truly expose the Badger defense.

Wisconsin and Oklahoma State are not the only teams who saw defense cost them a shot at a BCS championship berth; Stanford sits comfortably nestled in this group as well. The Cardinal are sitting at fourth in the rankings and have one game to thank for keeping them out of New Orleans this season, the 53-30 loss to the Oregon Ducks. With a win, first-year coach David Shaw would have been able to lead Andrew Luck and the rest of the boys to the Superdome for a national title shot. Sure, five turnovers served to compound the Cardinal’s struggle against Oregon, but when a team is giving up five yards per rushing attempt, it does not stand much of a shot to get three and outs and limit production on the part of a talented opponent.

The good thing for the Badgers, the Cowboys and the Cardinal is that their defensive gaffes did not force them to pay the ultimate cost: missing out on a BCS bowl. That gut-wrenching fate befell the Houston Cougars in their final contest of the season, the Conference-USA Championship Game. All season long the Cougs’ offense came to play and their defense was there to lend help at times. On the third of December, that same defense got run ragged by the Southern Miss offensive attack, both in the air and on the ground. As Case Keenum struggled to find openings in Southern Miss’s aggressive defense, his own defensive unit was parting like the Red Sea. Tracy Lampley, Austin Davis and Co. powered through to the tune of 42 points (Southern Miss scored seven on a punt block) when it was all said and done.

Playing defense has never stopped a team from going after a championship. Raising the talent level of a defensive unit has never served to hurt a team that had championship aspirations. Being sound in the fundamentals of tackling and alignment can never be seen as the product of wasted practice time – not when a defense is regularly forcing three and outs. That is defense in a nutshell, getting eleven hats to the football and stopping ballcarriers from advancing. No team has ever lost a game by giving up zero points.

That said, it seems through the new hirings of Leach, Fedora and Sumlin that the old adage continues to be ignored in favor of the flash and pizzazz that comes with high point totals and lots of yardage. Offense is great and quite honestly, great offense and a dearth of quality defense have given us some of our more entertaining games from the 2011 season: Michigan State’s Hail Mary win over Wisconsin. Clemson and Maryland going back and forth in College Park as Sammy Watkins put on a show. Michigan’s Denard Robinson driving the field to beat Notre Dame at the beginning of the season. All of the Big 12’s aforementioned point-happy funfests that were so fun to watch on television.

Lots of wins piled up in those games on the strength of the score. A lot of one and two loss teams were buoyed by the power of their offenses… and they’re not playing for the 2011 BCS championship, either.

After it is all said and done the two best defenses got the ticket to New Orleans… not because they are fancy on the offensive side of the ball but because they are remarkably exceptional at keeping the other team out of the end zone.

Offense wins games. The Stanfords, Oklahoma States, Wisconsins, Arkansas Razorbacks, and Houstons of the world will have a shot at winning yet another game this season. However, defense wins championships and only LSU and Alabama have a shot to do that in 2011. If someone wants to unseat the SEC; if someone wants to give their team a shot at reaching the promised land ruled by the one with the crystal ball trophy; if someone wants to be the BCS champion, it stands to reason it had better bring a defense to the party.