Building the 4-2-5 Defense

Gary Patterson - Texas Christian University
excerpt from 2011 Nike Coach of the Year Clinic Notes by Earl Browning available at www.coacheschoice.com

Thank you. It is has been a long time coming. I spent a lot of my younger years in California. I coached at California Lutheran University, Sonoma State University, and I coached at University of California at Davis. I recruited California when I was at Utah State University. It has been great to see a lot of people I know. It is a pleasure for me to be here. I spoke in Dallas earlier this morning, got on a flight, and arrived here late.

This is my 14th year at Texas Christian University. I was there as a coordinator for two years before I became the head coach. It has been a situation where my staff has been very loyal to our program. Most of them have stayed on through the years.

I will tell you X's and O's are not the reason we have become successful at TCU. They have helped. As it is in all of the other successful programs, including high schools, it starts in the off-season. I am the CEO of our program. I have seen head coaches who do not take part in the off-season program. They do not think they need to be involved. I talk to corporate people all of the time. The bottom line is this: success is harder to deal with than failure is. Some people who have success, they think they are a better person than what they were in the first place.

We all deal with failures. You have to give Boise State University a lot of credit for doing what they have with their program and all of the wins they have recorded. Chris Petersen was the quarterback when I was the linebacker coach at UC Davis. We all go away back with a lot of successful coaches.

Kids can go across the street, and people will tell them how good they are. How do we handle this situation? This year is going to be a lot easier for me. We have won 33 games and lost three games over the last three years. Those three losses have been to some good football teams. In 2008, we lost against the University of Oklahoma who played for the national championship that year. We lost to Boise State last year in the Fiesta Bowl. However, we defeated them the year before. We lost to the University of Utah who went on to defeat the University of Alabama in the Sugar Bowl that year.

The media was asking me on Friday before the Rose Bowl why I thought we had a chance against the University of Wisconsin. My response was, "You do not know what our kids have handled, and where they have been." This is the thing those people must understand. From the very beginning, when we start our off-season program, I do the running groups. I do not send our coordinators on the road recruiting during the off-season program.

Our strength coaches are good with numbers. I have an unbelievable staff. However, in these days, I have to grow the team up. I know many of the high school coaches do the same thing. We have to have a number of young players ready to play in the fall. I have to see to it they get the work they need to enable them to help us in the fall.

I am not one of these coaches who try to kill the players in the off-season. Is it hard? Yes! It is hard. The bottom line is this: instead of going for six minutes in a county-fair situation, we go two-and-a-half minutes at each station. We are going to teach them in that time span. We want them to believe we are not going to leave them out to dry. A lot of the exercises we are going to do only take six to eight seconds. This is the amount of time a play lasts in football.

In January and February, we do what I have been doing for 17 years as far as speed workouts, hips and feet workouts, and then lifting weights. Why do we run this type of program? At the end of February, I can sit down and compare the football team to any other football team I've ever had. I will be able to evaluate where we are in our hips, how well we run, and how mentally tough are we.

Our strength coach will get the players in the summer. He can use the parachute exercises with them, and make them do all the other things the strength coaches do with their athletes. We take our players to a one-rep max. Last year, we had seven players who squatted over 880 pounds, for one rep. We had 12 players who bench pressed almost 500 pounds. We do not use creatine or any other type of strength builders. You can get the program done, and you can do the things you need to do to build up your athletes.

If we are going to be a smaller defense, we must be faster, and we must be stronger. We use a pyramid in our program. Going back to Coach Pat Hill and talking about his program, we do a lot of the same things. The bottom of our pyramid never changes. At the bottom is: attitude, chemistry, family, and accountability. The second level has the code of purple with MTXE, which stands for mental toughness and extra effort. We do not color the block purple unless they achieve it. In 13 years, we have gone to 12 bowl games. We had one bad year where we had a few bad apples who prevented us from reaching our goals.

We always come back to start the year by starting at the beginning. We have not been as big or as fast in many of those 13 years. A lot of our kids came back to our team because they needed a second chance. That is the way our place is. That is what I think you have to do to be successful. Two years ago, we had 13 seniors on the team. Two of them were in the first and second rounds of the NFL draft. All of them received their degrees. This year, we have 20 seniors, and before we played in the Rose Bowl, 17 of those 20 seniors had their degrees.

I am one of those guys who has learned to flip the switch. When I walk on the field, I am intent. I tell this story to my players all of the time: "When you get married, your wife is not going to let you bring work home. When you leave home going to work, your boss does not care what happened at home. You have to learn how to flip the switch."

I want a player who wants to rip the head off the opponents when we walk onto that field. I want the players to have one girlfriend, go to church, go to class, get a degree, and do the things they need to do.

I have three boys at home who have probably taught me more than I have taught them. Nevertheless, I told the team this: "If I am going to spend more time in my life raising you than I do in raising my three boys at home, then I better try to do a better job at it."

Now that I have been at TCU for 14 years, we have some players in their early 30s who have been successful. Some of them own their own business, have built their own houses, and have their own families. This is well worth the effort we put into the program with them. I believe coaching is like being a great carpenter. You are going to build your business on referrals.

I am one of those guys who is not going to tell you what you want to hear. I lost recruits when I first started coaching. In Texas, we are known for being great evaluators of talent. My mother can pick out a great player, gentlemen. She benched me (laughs). Once you get those players, you have to know what you want to do with those players. You have to fit players into position. I do not mind doing that. It may be a lot easier to do that as the head coach than as a coordinator because I do not have anyone yelling at me.

The talent we recruited is how we made our program successful at TCU. I keep a tape of every recruiting class that we have brought into our program. I am not sure why we are still coaching at TCU. The first three or four years, it was hard to get good players. We were able to build a program that was tough. After the 2004 season, we came back and went to work. We drug-tested every one of our kids. We worked hard and got ready for the 2005 season. We beat Adrian Peterson and Oklahoma at Norman. Since that time, we have won a lot of football games.

I learned a lesson in dealing with kids, and how important great players are if they do not play within a team concept. Coaches address their teams and tell them what they want to hear. Then the kids go out and play the game, and they get beat. They tell the coach that he did not tell them what they needed to hear about the game. When kids come to our place, we tell them that is not the way things are going to work. The player will know from the beginning what we expect of them. I call them "paper tigers." First, we have to recruit them, and the sooner we do that, the better chance they have of being successful.

The two areas where we have problems with kids coming into college are reading and writing skills and math. There is as program called ALEKS®. You can find it on the Internet. It is a program online for 30 dollars. You can be tested in those special areas. It is a type of program where you must get the answer right to move forward. Every freshman who comes into our program must enroll in ALEK. By doing this, we can evaluate who they are and how they do things. This system helps us to deal with the students and how we can help them to become successful.

Another program that you can download is the Kurzweil 3000®. You can order their books, put on a headset, and the program reads the books to the student. The audio tells the students what a paragraph means and how to use it. If I want my athletes to play for me, I must prove I can be successful to get them to where they need to be as a student.

Outside of that aspect of dealing with the athletes, the rest is all of the soapbox stuff. I apologize. People ask me about our defense. When I talk about our statistics, people comment that we do not play the schedule that some of the other top 10 schools play. Not many of those teams want to play us anymore. In the last 10 years, we have been number one in the nation in total defense five times.

Going back to the last three years, we have been very successful on defense. To understand our defense you need to look at our base alignment (Diagram #1). We play a 4-2-5 defense. We have five defensive backs in our alignment. We have to have one player more than the offense can block on our defense. You may say that we blitz a lot. No, that is not what I said. On defense, if you want to have one more player than what the offense can block, you must have a man-to-man side. We play quarter coverage so we can play man principles on one side of our defense.

We teach three zone coverages. We play quarters. We are one of the few teams that runs an excessive man blitz package. We also run a zone blitz out of a two-shell alignment, and not out of a three-deep alignment.

If we face a team that likes to play with two backs in the backfield, we have to be able to stop the run. Teams use the eight-man front against the two-back set. I went to Texas Tech University several years ago to see their defensive scheme. The defensive coordinator was John Goodner. They were playing the 4-2 scheme. They used something in their package they called a "slide backs" move (Diagram #2). What they were doing was sliding a safety into the box when they played against a two-back team. They played a man-free coverage scheme. We play a little three-deep scheme with our package, but not much.

This is what I look at the end of the season. Obviously, scoring defense is important. The other thing I look at is stopping the run. In 2008, we held teams to 47.8 yards per game running the football. Immediately, you say, "You loaded the box to stop the run." We only gave up eight touchdown passes.

The key is the KISS method: Keep it simple, stupid. On defense, we want to have enough in our package that will allow us to be successful. How do you do that? We do it the same way as most of you do with your team. We have written down information on teams we play this coming season. It is: "New Game-Boise State."

We have the U.S. Air Force Academy on our schedule next season, and they are a triple option team. We run the weak zone play on offense. We are multiple in our offense. We go from the empty set to three backs in the offense. Because of that, we do not have to work on a lot facing their defense. All of the different types of offenses we are going to face next year, we are facing them every day in practice.

I am going to pick out Air Force, Boise State, and Baylor University, which is our first game next year. I know all the plays they like to run in the red zone. We have played Boise State the last two years, and we have only allowed one offensive touchdown in those two games. Boise State is good at what they do, and you better give them the respect they deserve. They are very good at what they do.

In our 15 days of practice in the spring training, we are going to take 15 to 20 minutes a day and work on the half-line option. We are going to spend time on the things we expect to see from Boise State. We are going have a team script, and we are going to work on Baylor as well. They are our first game of the season.

When we get into our two-a-day practice sessions, we are going to work on the half-line option, and we are going to work on Boise State every day. We do not play Boise State until the end of the season. When we get to that game, I want to have a game plan of what we want to do. If we do not prepare for them this way, we will not have a chance against Boise State. Offenses have been doing this type of planning for years because they can see what they want to do. A coach taught me the principle in preparing for teams. We back up, and we are going to prepare for the very best.

Today, most of the highly ranked teams play with two down defensive tackles. We do not play with two down defensive tackles. I believe in the one-gap principle. I want to let you know that I do not believe the 4-2-5 defense is the best defense ever made. I believe the 50 defensive front has strength. I believe the 4-2-5 defensive front has strength. We use all principles. The bottom line is this: does your defense fit your personnel, and can you fix that defense? When you are in a game and the offense causes you a problem, do you have the answer so you can do something to correct the problem?

I still call the defense at TCU as the head coach. It takes more time, but it is something I like to do. Put me in shorts and a t-shirt and give me a whistle, and I am happy at practice.

Most teams think TCU is an eight-man front defensive team. We are not an eight-man front team. If you watch us on film, you will see that we play more 4-3 concepts than we play an eight-man front. We do zone blitz, and we do man blitz.

The defense has to make the offense play their hole card. That is what we did in the Wisconsin game in the Rose Bowl. The linebacker had a big hit on a blitz. We had been keeping one man free in our dog package, where we bring four defenders from the off side. The way we were able to get the linebacker free to get the big hit was by running an all-out blitz, where we sent all five men on the same side. You have to have that in your package if you want to be successful.

If I can stop you with six men and play the run, it will make it easier on me in the secondary. If I can't stop you with six men, I will have to use seven men to stop you. If I can't stop you with seven men, I will have to use eight. If I can't stop you with eight men, I will have to use nine men. Against Wisconsin, it looked like we were using 15 men to stop them on the run. You saw the film, and you know they were a lot bigger than we were. Wisconsin was a very good football team.

It does not matter what I think about our team. If you can't get the team to take ownership, things are never going to change. Let me give you a great example. In 2009, we got beat by Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl. Our seniors came back and went to work. They ended up winning 44 games in their four years.

Soon after we found out we were going to play Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, I had a meeting with the team. I always lay out a calendar of what our plans are so everyone can plan accordingly. In that meeting, I discussed our schedule for the bowl game. We would practice on the morning of December 24. We would take off after that workout and report to school on the afternoon of December 25 and head for Pasadena for the Rose Bowl.

Several hands went up, and most of them were seniors. I figured they wanted more time off for Christmas. I was surprised. "Coach, we have the rest of our life to get a chance to spend Christmas with our family. We are only going to get one chance to go to the Rose Bowl."

We left for Pasadena on Christmas morning and had a practice scheduled soon after we arrived. Usually, that first practice is the worst practice during the entire trip. Everything is different, from the dressing rooms to the hotel to the practice field. The surroundings are so different they just don't practice very well. We practiced on Christmas later in the morning and got that out of our system. We took the rest of the day off and had some activities set up for them for the evening.

The next morning, we had a great practice, and later in the day, we went to Disneyland®. I learned this from Coach Petersen. We usually give our team off on the Monday before a game. We game the team off on Monday and went to visit the Rose Bowl. We let them take pictures and let them get all of that out of their system. We came back and got in our other practices the rest of the week, and you know the rest of the story.

In the Rose Bowl, the player who blocked the two-point play in the end zone did not play that well for the rest of the game. Like most of the time with the defense, it is the play we remember the most. However, he is a good defensive player.

Coach Lou Holtz had a saying that went something like this: "Inside and in front." Inside and in front means this: if I am a defensive tackle and the ball comes toward me, if I stay inside the ball, as long as the ball does not cut back across my face, I have a chance to make the play. If the defensive man outside the ball keeps the ball to his inside and does not let it cross his face, he has a chance to make the play. You would be surprised how often that happens in football. Just think about it; how often do we break that rule? We break it all the time.

W here we are different from other teams is on our rule for our safeties: "Don't go till you know." Other teams have their safeties backpedal in quarters, and we sit there and flat-foot shuffle. We want you to try to throw vertical. That is what we want you to do. This past year, we led the nation in three-and-out. Teams have an average of 12 to 13 possessions per game. We had three-and-out for an average of seven times per game. We want to take away the short game, we want to take away the combination routes, and we want to stop the run.

What are offensive teams going to try to do if we are successful in stopping these three categories? When I am talking about these situations, I am talking about first downs. If it is third-and-13, I am not going to be playing flat-footed. I am talking about first down. Here is the thing: most teams run their three-deep zone blitz, or their man blitz to stop the run. We will zone-blitz and run a two-shell with the blitz. We have played base with quarters the last couple of years. However, we do flat-foot on the coverage. You will get a chance to see that on film.

You saw us in the Rose Bowl. We did not tackle very well. This is what I want you to know about talking. That is for the off-season program. Good tacklers are strong players. If you do not have strength in your arms, shoulders, and legs, you do not have confidence. We can do all of the tackling circuits you want to do. The bottom line for us is the fact we are going to teach tackling last. The big back has become too big to tackle unless we hit him right in the hole. We are going to tackle less on anything on the edge. The little backs can outrun you. You have to go through the thigh and knee and go down the leg to the ankles. Running backs do not like to get tackled around the knees and ankles. The other point is that you will miss less tackles by going for the lower leg. In zone concepts, we want our kids to take the first shot. We do not want them to hesitate.

I talk to young coaches all of the time, and they want to know how to get to the next level. I apply the answer to that question to the corporate world as well. If you want to be good at something, you should not care how much money they pay you. The thing about it is the fact that I just got lucky in getting to the next level.

Do the best job you can, but go somewhere where people are good at what they do. Find the people who do things the way you think they should be done, and go work with them. You should not be so concerned about the other things. You are in it for the long haul. 1 am talking to the younger people here. I am talking about the long haul.

I came up the low road. I am not saying anything bad about UC Davis, but in South Carolina, they do not know where UC Davis is. I would not change anything I did, I would not want better people to work with, and I would not change how I was able to advance my career. I want you to know I learned more football in my first seven years than I have since that time. The principles I learned to live with are still there.

I can bring in a 220-pound player in as a freshman and I can add 35 pounds on him and still have him run as fast as he could when he weighed 220 pounds. I believe you kill with speed. If I could recruit a player who was 6'4", weighed 260 pounds, and could run a 4.5 40-yard dash,1 would do it. If I can recruit speed, I can add the strength. I can't make them faster.

Here is what I have to teach the assistant coaches: it is not about winning. It is about when I watch the film, does everyone fit where they are supposed to fit when the offense runs a divide zone? Does the defense get into their gaps? If the ballcarrier breaks back on the play, does the man who is supposed to fit that area to make the tackle make it? If the offense gets three yards, they win because we have more. It is not about winning; it is about learning to play as a team. Do you do your job every play?

We have young players to work with this spring. We want to get to where someone wins because he made a better play than his opponent did. He made the play not because someone did not cover his gap, or cover his man, or did not block the right person.

1-on-1 and 7-on-7—those are offensive drills. You have no pass rush on those drills. A defensive man could technically cover an offensive man in a 1-on-1 deal, and 50 percent of the time he could be successful without a pass rush or a blitz, he is going to win. We are working on technique and not about who won.

We run a drill we call rapid fire. We do 18 plays in about eight minutes. One defense stays on the field for three plays. To show you how I have changed, a long time ago when we did this drill, we would go ones versus ones, and we would run 15 plays. Then we would go twos versus twos. What happened is this: all we did was to teach them how to survive. At the time, we thought we were getting a lot of reps.

We changed the drill now so we have a different result. We start on the left hash mark, and then go to the middle, and then we go to the right hash mark. We start with the #1 defense versus the #2 offense. Then we have the #1 defense versus the #2 offense. Then we have the #1 defense go against the #1 offense on their third play. We have one group going rapid fire. We have to script the plays because it goes too fast.

Here is what the players have not figured out. If I am the #1 defensive team that starts out with the #1 offense, they are going to get two reps against the #1 offense and one rep against the #2 offense. Your #2 offense is getting better working against your #1 defense.

Then, when the #2 defense comes into the drill and starts with the #2 offense, they are getting two reps against the #2 offense, and one rep against the #1 offense.

I am finding out by the third play if they can play tired. I am talking about playing in Texas heat. I am talking about 115 degrees and in the 14th period of the practice. We are going to get 18 plays in eight minutes. Can they do it?

People talk about why TCU plays hard. The first thing is because we have good players. The second point is this: if you want them to play hard, they have to get to the point where they trust you. You have to make them tough enough to play hard, and they will do it in those conditions. I am not saying we have all of the answers, at all.

We use 55-gallon barrel trashcans with rope on the four cans in practice. There is a four-foot gap between each can. We put a person in the middle of the four cans as the center with a ball. The cans represent the offensive line. We have a manager, who has offensive cards for the scout team. We only have five offensive linemen for the scout team. From there, we run the play against the defense.

We still do the middle drill. We try to get an eight-play script, with #1 and #2 for 16 plays in 10 minutes. We have a 45-minute team practice period where we have 16, 16, 16, 16, and 10 plays. Each of those periods is done in eight minutes. I train the #1 and #2 to make sure they can play our scheme. We play base defense, and we do all of the personnel groups. We zone-blitz, and we man-blitz, and we do what we need to do.

When we get to game week, I do not want to be just working on our base defense. When we face the triple option, I want to be able to work on our other aspects of our blitz defense.

As a defensive coach, I know I was only going to get one chance. I was not a fair-haired boy. No offense to the offensive guys. You are always better looking, and the guy with the best-looking girlfriend. We can go down the list.

I believe you coach defense as if you are coaching offense. Offense has gotten so good, we must do this: we must teach our team what the offense is trying to do to our defense. We are going to check our coverages by what the offense does.

You must do this today because the offenses are so good.

We averaged 55.6 plays per game this year. That has a little to do with our offense. We had not allowed 50 plays in a game in four previous years. I know the offense cannot throw touchdowns if they are standing over on the sideline. You must be able to get the defense off the field. If the offense is running man pass routes, I need to be playing zone coverage. If they are running zone routes, I need to be playing man coverage. We still want to be able to come back and play great leverage defense.

I do not want to offend anyone, but I believe you must be a salesman to be a coach. If you want your kids to believe in what you are teaching them, you need to make them think you are good at what you do.

I believe when you do a drill, you are teaching. Instead of doing five minutes of the circuit drills, I am only going to do two-and-a-half minutes. I want to make sure my players know that we have to be in condition, we have to be tough, and mentally we have to have an edge.

We run a circuit drill we call the Colorado circuit. When we first started using it, we took about 45 minutes to complete. It has seven different stations. By the end of the third week, we have it down where it only takes us 28 minutes to finish. Once they do an exercise, if I see they are not doing the techniques and they are not in shape, we work them longer.

The better shape they are in, the less time I give them between drills. We cut the time down from 45 minutes to 28 minutes. All of the time we are doing these drills, we are building confidence within the players. We tell them how much better they are getting. You have to be careful in the drill. I am pushing them to their "wall" each day. The next day, their "wall" expands, and they can do the drill better. They never know how far they can go in the drills.

If you want your kids to practice hard, you have to put them in a position physically and mentally where they are challenged. You build them up to a point where they can do what you need them to do in the games.

We have two types of tackling circuits, and we have two types of takeaway circuits. We teach them how to strip the ball and how to recover fumbles, and how to pick balls up and run with them. We do all kinds of drills related to working with the fumble.

We developed a special teams circuit at the beginning of practice. We do two parts of the special teams that you never work on. For example, sky kicks to the up people on the kickoff return. There is an art to red zone punting. On Tuesday, we punt the regular type of punt down the field. On Wednesday, we are going to red zone punt. We have two lines of gunners going toward the goal line. How many times have you seen players running down the field on punts, and they never look up to find the ball? This is part of that drill. I am not saying we work on keeping the ball from going into the end zone. We are working on finding the ball.

On Thursday, we cover all of the aspects of the kicking game that will give our kids the chance to be successful. At times, we overlook those aspects of the game. Head coaches are worse than the assistance on this.

You are always welcome to come to see us practice in the spring. Call our office, and we will set up a time for you to visit. You can come on the field to see and hear what we are doing. You can see what we teach and what we do. The reason I am standing here today is because of our relationship with high school coaches. Without them, we are nothing. High school programs give so much to the college programs. In a lot of ways, high school coaching is a better job than college coaching. High school coaches can make a bigger difference in a kid's life. I know a lot of you will argue about the money signs. I will promise you this for college coaches: the only good day is July 7.

For you young coaches, don't forget about what I said about learning. Go somewhere that you can learn from the best of what you want to learn because that is how you can become successful. I used to think you needed to be good in a lot of things. I think you have to become great at something. In this profession, you have to be known for something to the point where you are a commodity and to where people want to hire you. If you can do that, success will follow.

No one in this room came from a lower road than I did. I am not going to forget where I came from, nor will I forget those who helped me along the way.

I just hired a grad assistant as my safety coach. I will tell you why I hired him. He made us a better football team. He was a walk-on wide receiver at Texas Tech. He was a high school coach, then a junior college coach, and then he came to work for us as a grad assistant. He understood what a secondary coach had to teach the players. Last year, he left our program to become a Division III coordinator.

I hired him to help us with our safeties. He is doing a great job as a recruiter. I asked him why he was working so hard. He said he did not want to lose his job. He has not made over 10,000 dollars in his whole life. Now, he is making a lot more than 10,000 dollars today. He knows his opportunity, but I know what I have with him. I did not have to go get a named person for that job. I needed someone who knew how we do things at TCU.

The coach I lost went to Texas Tech as the defensive coordinator. He is a good coach. However, the coach I hired is going to be special.

The older I get, the more I realize this game is not all about the fluff. When I was at the Rose Bowl, I realized I may never get a chance to enjoy that experience again. As soon as the game was over, they rushed me to the media room. I spent the next two hours telling people why we won the Rose Bowl. I did not get much of a chance to enjoy the victory after the game. Occasionally, I see something from the Rose Bowl game, and I tear up. I get a chance to enjoy it later, but I did not have much fun after the game. Our fans had a great time, and our players had a great time.

It has been a lot of fun visiting with you. Thanks for letting me come back to visit.