2020 New Mexico NFHS Summer Study Session Defensive Schemes 

Head Coach Aaron Ocampo, Centennial High School, Las Cruces, NM

Defensive Coach We Hurley, La Cueva High School, Albuquerque, NM

Dennis Barela (4s):

All right. Good morning. Morning, Ken. So we're back first training session of 2020 summer. We ended the spring rule session last month, about four weeks ago where we did, I don't know, 24 webinars and had, and you name it. We had a festival on giving us some great training from NFL down to division two to high school, high school experts from like Bob Arknown from Gannett, right from Alabama, just giving us some, some great, great training to the New Mexico high school officials.

Dennis Barela (43s):

But this morning we have two gentlemen from Albuquerque and from Las Cruces, they're high school football coaches that have a great to train us in defensive schemes and how they see the, the game of football through a defensive coaches perspective. So it's going to be interesting. This is the coaches opportunity to really talk to officials and kind of get everybody on the same page.

Dennis Barela (1m 18s):

So with that, Ken, are you there?

Ken Adent (1m 22s):

Yeah. Good morning, Dennis morning, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. It's been quite the spring session that we had, and I hope you guys, if he didn't get a chance to watch these live hit behind the flag website, AFOA ref website, and you guys can pull up all these previous webcasts, but today I'm really excited for, because we'd been talking about learning defensive schemes and defensive formations to make us better officials and really excited that these two coaches jumped on the first gentlemen who's gonna is on before I introduce.

Ken Adent (2m 4s):

And are you there? I can't tell. Okay. If not, no, we've got coach West Hurley from the <inaudible> high school defensive coordinator. As you guys all know these two coaches have their teams are always powerhouses year after year, and it never happens without a strong defense. So West has been married for 11 years to his wife. I don't have her name. They have an eight year old daughter Aspen, and a seven year old son of Noah West played for Carlsbad.

Ken Adent (2m 38s):

I didn't know that he'd been a quaver coach for eight years. Last four years have been defensive coordinator. Liquid has been in many state championship games. West is a national board certified math teacher and the Dean of students at the Academy at APS. So quite the resume there, Wes, I personally want to you for coming on. When I reached out to the head coach there he was Brandon. He just jumped all over this. So you guys at <inaudible> have always been really helpful for us officials.

Ken Adent (3m 12s):

You guys have even showed up at some of our meetings for the Albuquerque group and given us your time there. And we appreciate that as well. So take it away West the screen jurors.

Wes Hurley (3m 29s):

Thank you guys. I just want to say first, thanks. Thanks for having us. It's it's a pleasure to get to do this. I was talking to Dennis and I think this is like a, just a really cool experience and a really cool thing too, to sit down and actually talk football. And like me and Aaron were talking about, you know, we talk about football all the time with kids and clinics and stuff like that, but to be able to do it with reps is it's a really cool experience and a really good idea. I think. So. I just want to say thank you for the opportunity and thank you guys for, for all that you do for the game and, and allowing us to do it.

Wes Hurley (4m 4s):

So let's get started here. Can you guys see that? Yeah, we can see your screen. I don't know if I can hear him. Okay. Awesome. All right. So, so our basic defensive scheme is a four to five. That's four downline men, two inside linebackers, and then five DBS.

Wes Hurley (4m 37s):

We have two strong safety is on either side. Those guys kind of play almost like a hybrid of an outside linebackers slash strong safety position. And we bring pressure with that. We, we bring five to six guys more than 50% of the time. Usually it's just five. We don't bring a lot of six man pressures, but as we'll talk about in a little bit, some of that is, Is situationally dependent on down in distance, gain momentum, things of that nature.

Wes Hurley (5m 12s):

Some thing I feel like we do really well at, at Kuaba defensively is our Cub Ridge is aggressive. RDPs are usually very aggressive with, with rerouting hands-on receiver. There's, things like that. The majority of the time we are running a man free coverage or some variation of covered three different things like that.

Wes Hurley (5m 44s):

And something we preach to our kids. This is our kind of our defensive mantra is when we arrive, we will arrive violently. And we actually expand that to the kids. Like essentially just another way of saying like, if, when do something do it all the way. So we try to apply that to the classroom, to, to fundraising, to whatever they're doing. And like, look, if you're going to show up, you show up, you know, I'm in the weight room, whatever it is. So when we arrive, we're going to arrive with purpose, we're going to ride violently and we want people to know that we're there.

Wes Hurley (6m 20s):

So that's just kind of our, our defensive mentality and base very basic overview of, of what we run on situationally, just me as a play caller first and second down, we stayed pretty vanilla. Most of the time we'll play with coverage a little bit, you know, blitz a little bit here and there, but, but we're really trying to grind out first and second down. Most of the time we'll, we'll play a base defense unless we're looking for a change in momentum or a big play, or, you know, we've got a young quarterback and we feel like we've got him on tilt or, or something along those lines.

Wes Hurley (7m 5s):

And we'll, we'll, we'll start bringing a little more pressure at that point. Well, so we do have two different types of blitzes, third and third and fourth and short, which we define as less than four yards, we'll bring a run blitz. Most of the time, we usually do that in the A's and the a and B gaps, the, the insight gaps, but not always. It just depends on, on game playing game plan, as far as how the game is going, where their weapons are, where we think they're going to go.

Wes Hurley (7m 41s):

Things of that nature. Third and long, we kind of have two philosophies in the first option is will, will drop more men into coverage or we'll bring more pressure to rush that through some of that depends on what we've been seeing out of them. There's a lot of teams that like to max protect against us. And so with that, when you bring more men into max protection, you don't get there sometimes.

Wes Hurley (8m 12s):

And so your coverage can suffer. So if we have a team that's max protecting a lot, we'll drop into coverage and just let those guys sit back there. If they're releasing a lot of guys into routes and stuff like that, they don't have that max protection max protection will probably bring more than income block a lot of times to get to the off. And as far as just, you know, situational play calling, it really depends on, on where you are on the field.

Wes Hurley (8m 42s):

You know, as we get backed up against our own goal line, we're going to become more aggressive. You know, the, the field gets cut down, you know, if we're up and trying to protect lead, we may play off a little bit and make sure we don't give up the big play things like, you know, just simple things like that, things to that you guys might know like, Oh, in this situation they're pro you know, they might be looking to do this, you know, and I included some clips of that.

Wes Hurley (9m 13s):

So this is against Manzano second and nine. And, and this isn't a third quarter. We had this quarterback kind of Rattled a little bit. I felt so we bring some edge pressure and get there. You could see the backer kind of creep up right before he goes off the edge at the top of the screen. So that's just an example of, you know, Hey, we think we can get there. We think we can cost some, some havoc are defensive ends.

Wes Hurley (9m 44s):

If you look at the defensive end up top, he almost never goes inside. He's always playing outside contained. So when our defensive ends making strong inside move like that, it's, it becomes really difficult and an offensive tackle because he's used to him being on that outside shoulder, all games. So you can see he gets good pressure there as well. So, and you could see our coverage, the corner at the bottom, where we're definitely in a covered three, we're playing much softer than we usually play at this point.

Wes Hurley (10m 14s):

But we'll talk about the coverage behind it a little bit. Here's here's the end zone view kind of see the, the inside move and in the back or off the edge there, This is against elbow. And this is just an example of, he was trying to do this because we run that man free coverage teams really like to put us in most shit. And so you can see what they're trying to do. What Eldorado is trying to do here is just get that extra guy out of the box.

Wes Hurley (10m 45s):

They're they're having a hard time blocking us and stuff like that. So they, that motion doesn't really mean anything other than just getting him out of the box. And so you'll see, I know you guys see, give him a second E commerce and things like that.

Wes Hurley (11m 16s):

This is actually a really good play by the, the D end up top tasting that down backside. Am I good now? Yeah, we got you now, man. Free coverage. I'm sorry. You lost me there. Can you explain that? You guys hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So man free.

Wes Hurley (11m 48s):

And I'm going to go over that if we, so if we look at, let me stop this right here. So if we look at, this is actually covered three right now, but man free, what we usually do is because we have the five DBS one, two, three, four, five, every, every guy is manned up with a guy and then we have a free safety in the back. That's kind of, he's just playing center field is what he's doing.

Wes Hurley (12m 17s):

So this guy at the back doesn't have a man, unless we're bringing, if we bring a six man pressure, he usually has somebody that's when we're playing just a straight covers zero man, man defense. But man free means there's that free safety behind them. Excellent. Thank you. No problem. Good question. So here you can see, you can see, especially our corner at the bottom has really given us away. This is I'm Eldorado in the fourth quarter.

Wes Hurley (12m 48s):

So we're up a little bit. So we're, we're definitely, this is one of those situations where we're still bringing a little bit of pressure, but you can see our RDBMS are playing back. This is definitely a covered three. Our free safety should be closer to the middle of the field. Dropped a pick there, but high school kids. Right. But again, sometimes when we bring pressure, especially late in the game like that, if we're going to bring pressure off the edge like that, we're going to play as a soft coverage behind it to make sure we don't get burnt deep.

Wes Hurley (13m 31s):

This is another, you could see more emotion and us adjusting to it. This is another blitz off the edge, third and 12. And so, you know, third and 12, we've got a sophomore quarterback. This particular game was really windy. So, so we're going to put people in his face and make him make a, make a tough throw. You can also see our coverage a little better here with, with the rerouting, the collisions and things like that, which we'll talk about, but Yeah, we got there.

Wes Hurley (14m 5s):

We didn't get them, but that's enough to get him on the move and get him flustered and probably the same blitz. I think we saw against Manzano. You see it a little better CR or backer Walk up and then off he goes and you know, we miss him, but So that's third and 12. That's, you know, we got off the field right there. So that's, that's an easy play, You know, once, once we get there and get, get those guys off the field.

Wes Hurley (14m 38s):

Let's see this, this is a six man pressure. So this is again, right? The same game, third and nine. We got that sophomore quarterback still. So we're going to send some pressure, light him up a little bit, get him in there. So you see, we do a really bad job here of adjusting to the motion. So the motion comes across and we don't adjust to it. So we ended up with a wide open guy sitting right here. Luckily he drops that ball, but you can see, we don't adjust with the motion.

Wes Hurley (15m 11s):

We send six and we get there, but he misses gets the ball off that should've been in a completion. But again, third and nine, that's one of those situations where we're going to bring, we're going to bring extra guys in a situation like this. So I think that's all I offer situ. Yeah.

Dennis Barela (15m 29s):

I have a question. So you keep saying, you know, referring to the quarterback end and you know, he's a sophomore quarterback. Would your defense scheme change? If there was a senior out there that say, Hey, won the championship last year and he's just really picking you guys apart.

Wes Hurley (15m 49s):

Absolutely. You know, if that's a guy that's going to sit back there and make that I throw, you know, and like I said, the quarter, the quarterback here does a hell of a job of getting the ball to the receiver. But typically, you know, senior quarterbacks, they have a little more Moxie about them. They'll sit back there and make that throw and take the hit. And, and if that happens, now, we're sending guys, guys are open, windows are bigger. So it does depend on the kid. You know, we did the same thing against cebolla last year, they, they started that freshmen.

Wes Hurley (16m 23s):

So the young quarterbacks who aren't used to the speed of RC ball, we like to try to speed them up a little bit. You know, even if we don't get there, we want them in their heads about, Oh God, here they come. You know, just, just to give them something to think about, but it definitely changes based on, based on the age of the quarterback and you know, how experienced a quarterback is, you know, if we played this kid this year, we're probably not gonna blitz him as much because he's, he's a really good runner and he's, he makes really good decisions now.

Wes Hurley (16m 60s):

But luckily in this game he was just a sophomore. So that helped us.

Dennis Barela (17m 4s):

Right? No, I get it. I just need to stop here. I just wanted to clarify that can, you know, cause you know, blitz in the quarterback from Rio Rancho last year, Isaiah Chavis, that kid can run and, and you know, you just outrun your line, black Packers. But so, so as officials, you know, when we're tonight, pregame, we kind of want to know and take a look at, at who's on the field as far as quarterbacks and what the defense would like try to do to that quarterback.

Wes Hurley (17m 39s):

Absolutely. And Isaiah was, Isaiah was a hell. I mean, we, there were a couple of times we got to him and hit him right in his jaw. And he, he delivered the throw and then right up and each, you know, it's, it is really the difference in just that experience. You know, there's a, there's a big difference between a 15 year old and a 17 year old and, and in high school football. So that's why you always see senior heavy teams usually make a deep runs, have good seasons, things like that.

Wes Hurley (18m 12s):

So good question. I think I'm doing okay on time. The last thing I want to talk about is, Oh, so this is where we actually change our coverage. This is another situational here. You can see us in too high. We've got two safeties back there. We don't do that a lot, but this is right before halftime. They're going into to, to try to score it's first and 10, they're an empty, right?

Wes Hurley (18m 44s):

So there's no running back. So what we've done is we've replaced one of our linebackers with another DB, with another safety. And so our box is really light. But we're playing coverage behind it. So this is, this is one of those things where we don't necessarily, we still get to the quarterback, but in this, the philosophy behind this, isn't, we're not sending any extra guys we're just rushing for.

Wes Hurley (19m 14s):

And you can see we've got coverage across the board with two guys playing deep halves. . Trying to essentially protect the end zone before the end of the half. So, and you can see the coverage is pretty tight there. So, so let's talk a little bit about our man free. This is what we coach our kids to do. So our kids collision and reroute the receiver at five yards.

Wes Hurley (19m 47s):

If they get a pass read, we tell them not to take their eyes off their receiver. Okay. Our, our DB should not be looking back at the ball ever. And this has been a, we've actually had a refs tell us that they, they threw the flag because the DB wasn't looking back and you know, we have an exchange or whatever, but we, we coach our kids not to look back after we reroute. We tell them to play through the hands. So that means that that receiver's hands go up your hands, go up.

Wes Hurley (20m 18s):

So we, we absolutely tell them, do not look at it. Look back for the bar unless they are completely in face. So what we teach, what we coach our kids is if you are a hip to hip with that receiver, I mean, you are his shadow. You are on him. Then you can look back for the ball. Other than that, if you're out of phase by half a step, you have to play through the hands and play and keep your eyes on the receiver. If the ball. So our whole is creating very small windows for a receiver, for a quarterback to put the ball into.

Wes Hurley (20m 54s):

If the ball hits the hands of receiver, this is where the ARIDE violently comes in. We strip it out while securing the tackle. So we, we teach our kids until that whistle blows. It's not a catch. So even if the receiver gets his hands on the ball, we're going to strip and, and punch at it to try to knock it out. And, and I was talking to coach <inaudible> about this the other day, we, we really preach, do not grab and do not hold.

Wes Hurley (21m 24s):

We actually, we, every couple of weeks we will take a DB who who's got called for holding, or won't stop doing it in practice or something. And we'll put tennis balls in his hands and we'll duct tape him to where he has to play the whole practice with these duct tape clubs, to where he can't grab anybody. Mmm. So, you know, when you're, when you're creating that contact in that collision, I think it's natural for kids to, to want to grab. So that's, that's a habit and almost an instinctual thing that we try to coach our DBS not to, not to do.

Wes Hurley (21m 60s):

And you know what, the sideline we play. There's a lot of times, you know, we'll get a flag or something, there'll be coach. I...