One of the main reasons Arizona State is where they’re at – preparing for the Peach Bowl in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff – has to do with the offense. Head coach Kenny Dillingham is an offensive minded coach, but he doesn’t call plays.
After firing his first offensive coordinator after just one season, Dillingham needed to nail his second hire. He turned to Marcus Arroyo, a longtime coaching veteran who had studied under legends like Jeff Tedford and Todd Monken and called plays at Oregon before getting a shot as the UNLV head coach.
His failure in Sin City led him to the Valley, where Arroyo was tasked with building an offense around Cam Skattebo and freshman transfer quarterback Sam Leavitt. Things weren’t always perfect early on, but Arroyo settled into a groove as the season went on, and now Skattebo is one of the best rushers in the nation and Leavitt is poised to contend for the Heisman next year.
That said, Arroyo and the Sun Devils have yet to face a defense as tough and stingy as the one that awaits them in Atlanta on Wednesday. The Longhorns defense, coordinated by Pete Kwiatkowski, is arguably the best in the nation. They finished the season ranked third in yards allowed, second in points allowed, and fourth in takeaways. No other defense is in the top five all three of those categories.
Kwiatkowski has quietly been one of the top defensive minds in college football for some time now, and it was a coup when Steve Sarkisian landed him in his inaugural year as the Longhorns head coach. Kwiatkowski played for Boise State back in the 80’s and went straight into coaching at his alma mater when he graduated.
Kwiatkowski toured the JUCO and FCS circuit, with stops at Snow College, Eastern Washington, and Montana State. He returned to his alma mater when Chris Petersen was first elevated to head coach. There, Kwiatkowski was coaching the defensive line under Justin Wilcox, now the head coach at Cal.
Following the 2009 season, Wilcox left for the same job at Tennessee, and Kwiatkowski was promoted to defensive coordinator. Several years later, Kwiatkowski followed Petersen to Washington, where he once again replaced Wilcox, who had become the Huskies defensive coordinator under Sarkisian and then followed him to USC.
Petersen stepped down after the 2019 season, and co-defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake – who played for Kwiatkowski back at Eastern Washington – was named head coach. Lake retained Kwiatkowski as his coordinator, but a year later he left for Texas to join Sarkisian. Since then, Kwiatkowski has turned the Longhorns into a defensive juggernaut, seeing eight defenders selected in the NFL Draft and surely adding several more next April.
Philosophically speaking, Kwiatkowski is cut from the same cloth as Wilcox, who also shares defensive roots with Baylor head coach Dave Aranda. That all three of these coaches are widely viewed in coaching circles as some of the best defensive minds in the sport is no coincidence.
For those who like to use the digit system to classify defensive schemes, Kwiatkowski’s defense is best described as a 2-4-5. What that means is he’ll use two down linemen, traditionally defensive tackles, with four linebackers. However, two of them line up on the edge, two of them are off the ball as traditional linebackers, while five defensive backs flood the secondary.
Kwiatkowski, like Wilcox and Aranda, rarely blitzes. He prefers to utilize a wide variety of twists and stunts along the defensive line, as well as simulated pressures, to trick offensive lines and conceal who is actually rushing the passer. Oftentimes he’ll drop one of his edge players into coverage and send a defensive back to the quarterback, effectively blitzing while still only rushing four.
The back end is where Kwiatkowski has evolved. Throughout his career, Kwiatkowski has made ample use of two deep safety shells, primarily running Cover 2 and Cover 4 and leaving the middle of the field open. But with Texas moving to the SEC this year, he wanted to tweak the coverage scheme and make it more fullproof against the run-heavy offenses he’d be facing.
That led to Texas hiring Johnny Nansen as the co-defensive coordinator. Nansen had been the defensive coordinator for the Arizona Wildcats the past two years and helped turn around a unit that had been dismal before his arrival. Nansen had worked under Wilcox at USC some time before, and came in with a level of familiarity with the scheme.
Whereas Kwiatkowski was a tride and true MOFO (middle of field open) coordinator, Nansen was the opposite, preferring to close off the middle of the field. He made extensive use of Cover 1 and Cover 3 schemes at Arizona, clogging up the middle of the field and loading the box with defenders to better stop the run.
This year, with Kwiatkowski and Nansen together in Austin, the Longhorns have become a mix. They’ve run Cover 3 on 39.7% of their defensive snaps and Cover 4 on 25.7% of snaps, a fairly even split between MOFO and MOFC. Both of those rates are well above the national average, too. Their next most common coverages are Cover 1 (15%) and Cover 2 (8.4%), but Texas is primarily dropping into one of the two zones between Cover 3 and Cover 4.
The challenge with running so much of just two coverage schemes is that offenses can build their entire playbook out of Cover 3 and Cover 4 beaters, but where Kwiatkowski has succeeded is in the talent level he has at Texas. The Longhorns defense is filled with twitchy athletes who, by now, have developed great instincts and clean eyes in coverage. This allows them to break on routes and disrupt almost anything, even the plays designed to beat their coverage. It’s the built-in benefit of coaching at one of the most recognizable brands in sports.
What that means for Arizona State, at least in the passing game, is they’ll need to be able to stretch the field vertically. Both Cover 3 and Cover 4 present opportunities over the middle so long as you can stretch the zones out. Leavitt has also greatly preferred throwing in the middle of the field, with a whopping 55.1% of his targets this year cioming between the numbers.
Creating those open throwing lanes will be a challenge, though. The Sun Devils are still without Jordyn Tyson, far and away their best receiver. Xavier Guillory showed some vertical capability in the Big 12 title game, but he still has just 320 yards on the year. Tight end Chamon Metayer should figure heavily into the passing attack as an underneath option, but Arizona State will need to bank on yards after the catch to move the chains.
One potential wild card is Raleek Brown. The slender running back missed most of the season with an injury, but has been a full participant in bowl practices. Brown’s speed and agility make him a speedy threat who can also get some work in the slot. He’s only played 27 snaps in two games for the Sun Devils, so it may be unrealistic to expect anything from him, but Brown is oozing with talent and is one player the Longhorns have no film on coming into this game.
More than anything, though, this will be the Skattebo show yet again. Texas ranks 11th in rushing yards allowed and 12th in yards per carry, but Skattebo is the most talented running back they’ve faced all year. Few defenses have been able to bottle Skattebo up, even when loading up the box the way Texas is likely to try. If the Longhorns can contain Skattebo, this will likely be a long day for Arizona State.