The path to a college football title ends in Indianapolis this season, but all roads must go through Athens, Georgia, and the best collection of 11 players in the sport.
Georgia’s defense stands not just as the class of 2021’s college football season, but it also knocks on the door of historic greatness in an era of more space, yards and points than we’ve ever seen. The Bulldogs currently rank first in PFF defensive grade (94.8), pass coverage grade (94.9) and expected points allowed per play (-0.451).
For years, Gary Patterson laid claim to the most flexible defense in the sport, Brent Venables’ current tenure peaked as what looked to be the Alabama antidote, Pat Narduzzi’s old-school Cover 4 helped build Michigan State into a contender and Bud Foster was all but guaranteed to kick dust in the eyes of an ACC championship hopeful. Dave Aranda, Jim Leonhard, Todd Orlando, Jon Heacock and Marcus Freeman are all 3-4 coaches who have introduced their only flavor of containing explosive offenses in this wide-open era.
In these ranks stands Kirby Smart, a coach from the most decorated tree in college football. Before Lane Kiffin came by to revolutionize the way Alabama played offense, Smart worked on the stifling Crimson Tide defenses from the beginning of Nick Saban’s tenure until 2015.
Between each of these names are a variety of schematic approaches — from man-to-man to three-high zone safeties, even and odd fronts and disparate levels of talent. However, the one thing that’s almost universally held between each of these signal-callers is the ability to blitz the spread.
While no one would be foolish enough to claim that any of the Alabama defenses fell short of greatness, it felt that the best offenses were creeping closer to drawing even. By Smart’s own admission (at a 2019 coaching clinic), the sentiment in the coaching offices at Tuscaloosa was that they were “slipping.”
