Bateman Explains His Defense
CHAPEL HILL – North Carolina defensive coordinator Jay Bateman explained his unique defensive philosophies and approach during a 14-minute press conference Wednesday at the Kenan Football Center.
Bateman came to UNC after running Army’s defense for the last five years with tremendous success. Here he describes the defense and fields questions about how he came to adopt this approach, its intricacies and more.
Below are a few nuggets from what Bateman had to say:
*His mission on how to put a cohesive group on the field executing a scheme that requires a great deal of communication, hybrids and plenty of disguises.
“The main thing I try to do is I try to find who are best eleven players our and play those guys. And so, if you have a defense that, ‘No I have to have this kind of guy and this kind of guy,’ and you don’t have that kind of player or that player gets hurt, all the sudden the defense suffers. So, you need to have enough multiplicity in your defense that you can manipulate you coverages, your run fronts, however you try to defense people with who’s available to you. When you coach at West Point, you better be able to use some different body types at times.
“I know a lot of people get caught up in is it a 3-4 (defense), is it a 4-3, I think that’s really overrated nowadays because everybody does a little bit of both anyway. We’re going to be pretty multiple and try to find out that week, based on who we’re playing, what the best way to handle them will be.”
“If you lineup (defensively) the same way every time and they know where you are and they know what coverage you’re going to be in, I think it’s very easy to attack you. And I think the thing offensive coordinators have gotten so much better at in the last 15 years or so is that they will take the easy play all the time. You can kind of play off and you saw the same four of five plays.
"Most of the teams we play now, they don’t run the same play twice. So I think on defense what I try to do now is, it used to be like I’m gonna be in one coverage, I’m going to be in one front, and we’re going to defend everything and our kids are going to know how to do it. I think now they’d kill you if you do that. So, my thing is now, I’m going to call defensive plays and I’m going to dictate to you. I say this all the time, ‘We’re going to solve our problems with aggression.’ If I’m pressuring and you have to deal with that, that limits how many plays you can run.”