Written by Steven Godfrey at SB Nation.com
What’s a defensive coordinator to do when the nation’s best team switches play callers the week of the national championship?
Clemson has to answer that question for Monday night’s National Championship. Seven days before kickoff, Alabama announced a surprise fast-track of its transition from FAU head coach Lane Kiffin to new offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian, the former USC coach who’d been on staff for much of the season as an analyst.
SB Nation asked two defensive coaches of recent Alabama opponents — LSU’s Dave Aranda and Ole Miss’ just-retired Dave Wommack, whose defense twice beat the Kiffin Alabama offense — how to address the transition.
Kiffin’s offense was built on your mistakes, not Alabama’sstrengths.
“What makes [game-planning] hard this week is that Kiffin was such a huge influence on that offense, with all due respect to Coach Saban and everyone else,” Aranda said. “And it was a lot of offense. We have a formation chart for each week’s opponent. When we put up Bama’s, we couldn’t fit all the formations on our board.”
Thanks to years of the best recruiting in college football, Alabama is talented everywhere. Scouting particular players is usually an early step in game-planning against an offense. But this depth, according to Aranda and Wommack, allowed Kiffin an unusual amount of freedom.
Rather than build a game plan around formations and plays Alabama excelled at or around particularly good Alabama players, Kiffin’s offense would scout every play your defense struggles against and install that, even if it’d never run it before.
“Auburn had a fly sweep with a wheel route off of it. We struggled with it when we played them, and it eventually led to our defeat. I knew we’d see that against Alabama, and we did,” Aranda said.
“We were playing Southern Miss, and they’re in a two-two set [two receivers, two tight ends] with the back offset. The receivers are snugged, and the back runs a wheel unmolested into the boundary. [Southern Miss] hit us on that one, and then that was in Alabama’s offense against LSU. That specific play was there.
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