One of the better Husky Football blogs out there is the one Bob Condotta runs at the Seattle Times. Last week, Condotta brought us some video interviews of some of the Huskies' new coaching staff, and even transcribed them out. Below, I've embedded the interview with new Husky OC Justin Wilcox, and one portion that really stuck out to me was his vision for the Huskies defense, which has been notoriously bad the last few years.
Condotta and Husky Defensive Coordinator Justin Wilcox:
On what he wants to do schematically: "We kind of have a basis of things we like and believe in. You've got to have an identity in terms of schematics. At the same time you don't want to try to jam a square peg into a round hole. So we are going to see what we are good at and put the stress on our better players and not going to ask a guy to do something he can't do. You can't line up the same way anymore every down because people are too good on offense, especially in this conference.
The days of people lining up in two backs and running tons of play action are over, especially out here. There are some unique offenses out here that can present a lot of problems. What we need to do is find out who we can rely on and who to put the stress on and we have an idea but as we get through spring ball it will kind of develop our scheme --- we know what we kind of want to do but we don't want to jam a square peg in a round hole and do something we are not good at.''
On going to more 3-4: "Yeah, we are probably a little more underfront 3-4-type looks. But in defensive football there are a certain number of ways to do things and it's really about how well you do them and we need to make sure we are doing it at a high level --- that's really the goal.
But in terms of some of the fronts there will be a little more underfront, 3-4 without getting too specific. ... That's a very personnel-driven decision and you can kind of start moving one way and go that direction down the road which is a possibility, but we'll see. A lot of that has to do with your body types and what you can recruit and what you have on your team and again you don't want to make it a three-year 'well, these guys don't fit.' You don't want to do that, it's what's your best chance to win.''
Make sure you check out Condotta's excellent Husky Football blog here.