McKewon: We’re talking about tackling — and it’s not Nebraska’s first struggle with a lost art | Football

And in 2012 at UCLA, the Blackshirts had one of their worst nights. NU — No. 16 at the time — allowed 653 yards to the talent-laden Bruins. Husker defenders slipped and slid all night on the tight Rose Bowl grass, missing too many tackles to count.

Pelini was “embarrassed” by the performance. The defense was inconsistent, its fundamentals lousy. And the tackling?

“We didn’t execute well, we didn’t tackle well, we didn’t do anything well on the defensive side of the ball,” Pelini said. “Many times we had opportunities for tackles for losses that ended up in long gains.”

Yes, we’re talking about tackling — the bane of a defensive coordinator’s well-planned schemes.

Gone are the days when most college teams lined up in the Power I formation and dialed up 12 straight runs that pitted the guts of the offense against the defense, when men collided in a hole no bigger than a phone booth, three yards from of the line of scrimmage, a couple bighorn sheep butting helmets. That kind of tackle may well be flagged for targeting in this day and age.

So tackling is more of a martial art that combines speed, aggression and leverage, with the helmet aimed, at least for Nebraska football players, at the “near hip” of a ball carrier. According to defensive coordinator Erik Chinander, the head ideally fits right where you might keep change in a pocket.

“That’s where the strike zone is in college football anymore,” Chinander said last week on Husker Sports Radio, two days before his defense allowed 642 yards in a 45-42 loss to Georgia Southern. “The way that the space game has become, there was a lot of — shoot, even when I played high school football, it was a lot of ‘stop your feet, get your head across the bow, those types of things.”

Nebraska, Chinander said, doesn’t believe in that. It believes in running through tackles, and always gaining ground against ball carriers. Never stop your feet. Tackle on the fly.

“Long stride, short stride, shuffle and shoot through the ballcarrier,” Chinander said. It’s a common style of tackling, but the Huskers, through three games this season, haven’t tackled very well.

According to Pro Football Focus data, NU has missed 12.3 tackles per game. Among Big Ten teams, that’s the third-highest number, trailing Indiana (17.5) and Penn State (12.5). Every team misses tackles — even stalwart Iowa. But the Hawkeyes have missed just 5.5 per game so far.

Chinander said last week that Nebraska defenders have to better “leverage” their tackles — that is, know which they have help so, if they miss, the miss won’t cost NU too many yards. Misses have generally been costly to NU thus far this season, especially on short pass and running plays.

Now-fired head coach Scott Frost — and new interim head coach Mickey Joseph — seemed to think part of the problem was Nebraska not tackling often enough during the week of practice. Frost pitted his No. 1 offense against the No. 1 defense more often in the week before the Georgia Southern game in order to give the defense a better look in terms of speed and physicality. It didn’t work; Nebraska’s defense often seemed helpless against Georgia Southern’s backs and receivers.

Joseph had the team tackling more on Tuesday than it had before. College defensive backs in particular, Joseph said, don’t have enough in-week reps of tackling ball carriers to the ground, reflecting a recent trend of defenders “thudding up” ball carriers — hitting them and slowing them down — without bringing them to the ground.

Though Joseph didn’t mention it, the “thud” approach tends to be a different level of speed and aggression than a real tackle. It’s hard to thud while going for a man’s legs. For one season, Nebraska’s 2016 team actually paid $100,000 for a rugby tackling system, developed by Atavus, to better simulate the leg tackles often used. Husker defenders would tackle from their knees in one drill.

One year later, then-defensive coordinator Bob Diaco lambasted what he perceived to be bad habits drilled into the players.

“I’m not sure what it even was supposed to look like,” Diaco said at the time. “I’m not sure they were pulling off what they were — I just don’t know. I just know when I went to that drill — to say ‘alarming’ would be an understatement. I could feel it on the players. My heart went out to them.”

Diaco suggested NU’s athletic administration had mandated the system.

“He’s full of it,” Mark Banker, the 2016 defensive coordinator, said of Diaco. “He’s making excuses.”

Even if Frost was fired, things don’t seem quite that toxic around Nebraska’s tackling issues.

“I thought they tackled good today,” Joseph said of Tuesday’s practice. “When they had the opportunity to do it, I think they do it well. It’s muscle memory. It’s something you have to do a lot to do it well.”