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Jordan Davis Says Vic Fangio’s Scheme a “Breath of Fresh Air” for Defensive Line
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More player interviews on day two of Eagles training camp. Jordan Davis brought up Vic Fangio’s scheme when asked how he and Jalen Carter are approaching camp:
“Technique. Technique and the understanding of how we’re playing and how the scheme is going to work out. We’re just really excited, all across the board for the d-line, like Milton (Williams), all of those guys, we’re just excited to play in this scheme. Moving a lot more. We have a lot more opportunity to make plays. And that’s not to (discredit) any of the past coordinators, but there’s a new freshness, a breath of fresh air, for the defensive line. It just kind of feels familiar for us (Davis and Carter) because that’s the type of scheme we played at Georgia. It just feels really familiar and we like it. We just try to do the best we can to maximize our opportunities inside the defense and inside the scheme.”
Back then, Kirby Smart and Dan Lanning were running the UGA defense. 3-4 looks with two safeties, rotation among the front seven, athletes all over the field. That defense was insane, and featured all four of Davis, Carter, Nakobe Dean, and Nolan Smith, who combined for 14.5 sacks and 32.5 tackles for loss.
Ted Nguyen wrote a great post a couple of years back that went in depth on Fangio’s system, describing line play like this:
“To get away with playing two safeties deep and lining up light boxes, Fangio and his disciples have their defensive linemen play with a gap-and-half technique.
When playing this technique, defensive linemen aren’t aggressively coming up the field as a single-gap team would and they aren’t just trying to stay square on offensive linemen and control two gaps like old-school, odd-front teams would do. Instead, they attack their primary gap with enough control so that they can “fall back” into their secondary gap. The objective isn’t to make a tackle but force the ball to “roll” outside, which gives defensive backs time to come up in run support from depth. What they don’t want is for vertical seams to open up on the first level and have ball carriers quickly get north and south.”
Can’t be having vertical seams out there. Hopefully Jordan Davis and Jalen Carter are stuffing the gaps. Let’s get the linebackers downhill to lower the shoulder. Let’s get the defense “flying around” out there.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com