4-2-5 Big Nickel

Just wanted to get you guys opinion on the "Big Nickel"

It consist of having Hood, Hampton, Heyward and Keisel at the front and Timmons and Foote as linebackers.
It was posted on Steelers Depot and I wanted to see what everyone else thinks.

I don't understand why you would take your best pass rushers out of the game on a known passing down. Hood and Keisel at the the Defensive End position is not going to generate any pass rush. The editor mention it was probably needed to guard aganist the run. But Woodley can play end and Keisel usually stands up at the other side.

I don't know,chime in when you get a chance.

 

they are in the top 10 in total defense, but they are in the bottom half in sacks. they are having a tough time getting to the qb with the scheme they have right now. DL is a great coach, but he doesnt have the players he used to.

 

I'm not so sure about it. But, I think your going to see us move to a 4-3 soon, We starting to have some good depth on the defensive line.

 

Manning has always been difficult to sack, he reads and gets rid of the ball so fast. I'm not too worried about sacks at the moment. They will come. I think we will see that 4/2/5 messed with a bunch. Mundy won't typically be in on that D, unless it really becomes a 4-1-6 with Troy playing next to Timmons. I could see us moving Hood to the middle, saving Keisel some wear and tear as the year goes on by pulling him out and sticking Heyward in there really moving to a 2-3-6 formation.

Hood/Heyward
Harrison/Woodley - These guys line up on the line like you would in a 4/3.
Timmons
Troy - lined up at the ILB position to roam around and cause havoc.
Mundy, Clark, Allen, Ike, Lewis

 

Good depth on the defensive line?

Hmm . . . I was thinking with the departure of Hoke and A Smith, that was actually an area of concern.

Hampton is about done, McClendon stepped up nicely last year, Keisel is wearing down, and Heyward and Hood haven't lived up to first-round pick expectations.

 

i think woods and heyward have played well. keisel and mclendon have played pretty well. ta'amu will learn. ziggy? he still can't get off a block. i do think we have quite the solid bunch. i'd like to see some more out of the linebackers though in the pass rush. if the backers are getting in there it will force more sacks to the d-line and visa versa. this old adage that the d-line is only there to stop the run and take up blockers is fine, but getting off those blocks to pressure the qb can also be used to take up blockers. everyone is allowed a piece of the pie.

we rush two OLB, two DE, a NT, (that takes 5 guys to block minimum), alot of the time we send an ILB too. why can't we get there? why are these guys eating up blockers not freeing up the LB'ers? why are the LB'ers not getting there on a regular basis? is anyone getting double teamed? thats 6 rushers, if they block them one on one that's 6 blockers and the QB, thats 7, how are they completing passes on this so regularly? coaching? and i don't mean just DLB?

believe me i think they will get better this year, but man i just don't get why our numbers are so down. they have given up under 100 yds. rushing in both games, not bad, but we need some fumbles caused by these guys too. is it not taught enough? lots of questions right now.

 

i still think its too early to put the tag of "not living up to first round pick expectations" on Heyward. i dont think hes been given enough playing time yet. he did have a sack last wek in limited time. i would like to see him get a few full games in to see what he really can do. the same goes with a lot of these young guys. Sylvester, Worilds, Carted, Heyward, McClendon and even Hood. i know they have all seen the field, but at some point they need to get the majority of the playing time if the coaches really want to see what they have. i know they see them in practice, but practice and game time are very different. some guys are not good in practice, but once the real game starts, they look like different players.

im not saying throw in the towel and let the young guys all learn on the job and forget the season. i still think they have a great shot at making a run this year, but the defense has slown down over the last 2 years and some changes are needed. if for no other reason than to shake guys up. maybe the guys on defense have become to comfortable.

 

I essentially see Hood/Heyward as 2nd round picks since they were at the bottom of the first. Plus what we draft olineman for you not going to get big stats from these guys.

 

The sacks and pass rush dropped off pretty much after the loss to Green Bay, when there was all that stuff about how teams had found the way to beat our defense by basically abandoning the run and throwing all day at us. I'm wary of the black'n'gold specs, but I do believe the adjustments that Lebeau made to the defensive strategy have worked well in response to how offenses were gearing up to play us. We may not like it that we don't have sack stats, and give up 100 yard games, but overall the shift has been fairly effective imo.

 

That strategy started WELL before XLV. It began in 2002 when Brady and Gannon opened up chucking the ball 43 and 64 times respectively in back-to-back routes to open the season. New England has employed that strategy against us pretty much ever since.

Most teams would like to do it against us but they don't have the talent to pull it off.

It generally takes a talented qb to beat us. We tend to dominate the teams in this league that have mediocre quarterbacks (see: Mark Sanchez) and struggle with the teams that have elite qb's (see: Peyton Manning). Whenever we go 13-3, 12-5, etc, you can scan our schedule and learn really quickly why we had such a good season (Colt McCoy twice, Andy Dalton twice, Joe Flacco twice, Kellen Clemens, Kevin Kolb, Tavaris Jackson, Alex Smith, Matt Schaub, Matt Hasselbeck, Curtis Painter, Blaine Gabbert, Tyler Thigpen, etc). A lineup like that adds up to a very nice season because those qb's aren't going to get any quick strikes or sustain long enough drives. And it doesn't matter if we face a team with an elite back. We'll still hold that elite back to 60-80yrds.

The teams that throw the short-to-intermediate passes (and do it well) can carve us up so long as they don't turn the ball over. Our defense is designed to prevent the long, quick scores and hope to create a sack/generate negative yardage at some point in the drive. It also shortens the game and keeps us in most every game since, when a team does score, their drives generally tend to eat up a lot of the clock (see: the Jets first two scoring drives Sunday).

 

Yeah, I don't disagree on that. What I was saying was, there was a shift in our defensive philosophy that seemed to be aimed at countering that strategy (as more teams seemed to be able to do it against us - maybe due to personnel on either side of the ball) in the last year or so, which has meant we get less sacks, but a better pass defense.

 

I consider big nickel only when they use a safety (Mundy) instead of a cornerback (Allen/Brown) as the 5th defensive back.

Who they use in the front 6 is kind of meaningless to the definition. Traditionally, when Lebeau goes to nickel packages (regardless of S/CB), he removes his nose tackle and he might rotate in a fresh DE. You might give Keisel a rest and put Heyward/Hood and the four starting linebackers.

I rarely, if ever, see Lebeau pull linebackers. So far this season, we have 457 linebacker snap counts out of a maximum of 468 (that's if 4 linebackers played every defensive snap). In week 1, we had 4 linebackers on the field every defensive play.

 

In the Jets game they took out both our pass rushing outside linebackers on certain down and distances. I think thats part of the Big Nickel as they inserted all dlineman. Hood,heyward,hampton and Kiesel. They only had two ILB (Foote, Timmons). three safetys (Mundy, Clark, Polomalu) two corners (Lewis, Taylor).

Check on Steelers depot.com and it shows pictures.

 

That is called Dime: 6 db's.

 

The 4-2 is standard nickel that the Steeler's personel is not built around. I think that a 3-3 would be a good "Big Nickel", but who do you take out Timmons or Foote? Foote has been very good this year, but Timmons is "faster" (supposedly). Also, are they good enough to be alone at mlb? I think that a really good mlb makes it usable. Maybe with Troy lined up toward the los? 3-3 maintains the edge better and provides more options...

What you listed from that site may work ok but I would take one of the lineman out and put Woodley or Harrison in there, and also replace Hampton with McClendon for this scenario. So I guess I do not like their package.

 

Very good assesment Mac daddyo! The very most important facet in the game today is to get
PRESSURE on the QB. Even the best of them will make mistakes as we witnessed Monday night.

 

The Big Nickel is nothing to get excited about. LeBeau's mindset is to stop the run,pressure the QB, keep the catch in front of you AND limit yards after catch to as close to zero as possible. He finds players to fit his scheme to accomplish this. He likes the overall flexibility the 3-4 brings and variations he can create using his 3-4 personel.

As much as fans hated William Gay ( because he had bad 1-on-1 coverage skills ) he was vaulable to our system because he was a great tackler and limited YAC to practically zero. No 1st down,we stuff the run,then get a sack and then they punt.....

Brady and belicheat learned how to beat that by using the short pass in place of the run. Most elite QB are harder to beat because they make Great presnap reads and make adjustments at the LOS and aren't as fooled by the zone blitz as other qbs.LeBeau finally solved our Brady/belicheat problem by employing "his" version of the old "46" defense.

The Big Nickel is just a defensive formation being put out there on tape to create new film study problems for our opponents come playoff season. It also is a few plays that can be effective while giving our OLBers a breather on long drives since we're very weak right now on our OLBer position.

Who knows, this experiment called the big nickel could become the new great defensive scheme to sweep the NFL or it could be just a package to be used sparingly in situational football.

Cajun-

 

he had a good game against brady last week.

 

I think a health James Harrison and Troy would fix a lot of this. With James in, they can't concentrate on Woodley. With a healthy Troy, they can't concentrate on anything.

 

The problem as I see it Mac is two fold. First and this is the important one in order for some of the more complex blitzes utilized by the Fire-Zone blitz concept you need the front three or four if they are sending the outside linebacker to open gaps in the offensive line. We should be familiar with this since it happens to us all the time. The problem comes when opposing offensive lines force that pressure inside where they can work together to effectively block five or six with four and leave a tackle and TE or tackle and RB to pick-up any pressure that gets around the edge. You can see this in the MLB crossfire. where Casey used to draw a double team taking up the guard and the center then the DE's take their man wide opening dual gaps for the MLBs to shoot through forcing a RB to choose and teh free man gets to the QB. Only now Hood is trying either Bullrush or jump inside quickly which doesn't create gaps, one side of the line eats up the three(NT, DE and MLB) and the remaining MLB gets blocked by the RB. This type of thing happens on more than just the crossfire blitz, it happens when they use their standard blitz package where both outside Lb blitz. The Dline simply can't create favorable matchups and are forced into trying to rip apart the heart of the opposing offensive line.

The second half is when they try using the CB's and Safeties to blitz from the outside. When this happens more often than not the blitz is completely negated by the simplest of blocks. They usually run full speed hoping that speed will suit them better than anything else. When if they slow down just a tad throw a little move in to fake out the RB and then slip by them they can force the QB to an early throw or force them out of the pocket. If you send a CB and Safety you should be able to do more with it than just run into the RB who is looking to block on the pass.

Thats my take on it anyway.

 

i agree with you thorn. our o-line gets out of position easily. they spread them out one on one by getting into our slow linemen quickly. they then have their hands full with that man and have no idea that a blitzer is coming past them. their man then gets off their initial block and cleans up with our guys turned around watching.

i sure wish we had harrison and blitzed him up the middle. he knocked linemen back into the qb when they tried it before. this alone would free up the outside backers rushes or at least the DE's. i hope sly makes a difference in this aspect.

 

I think you better have DL that can rush the passer, As far as I see we DO NOT,
I was hoping that Cam Heyward would have been that person? Unfortunatley
him and Ziggy, Kiesel have done nothing, Oh well its early, maybe things will change

 

I have begun thinking a better scheme is actually a 3-3-5.

I don't think Troy is as effective when there are four DBs on the field. It leaves them vulnerable. Solution? Always have five, and freeing him up to do what he'd best at: lining up and playing anywhere. We don't need a fourth LB if/when he's in the box.