The Oregon offense sputtered out on Saturday against a Cal defense that faced a challenge like David did facing Goliath. So how did Cal, with several injuries in their starters, manage to contain the high speed tempo of the Ducks?
Cal came up with a gameplan and stuck with it. This is the key against the Oregon offense. Many teams come up with a plan and get run over in the first quarter. Many teams will panic and try to adjust on the fly, this is exactly what Oregon wants you to do.
Cal came out and began using different defensive fronts, switching from 4 down linemen, to 3, then to 5 at times. This confused the Oregon front 5, including center Jordan Holmes, forcing the Oregon offense to make audibles at the line and run right into the Cal front. Moving and changing the looks on defense caused the Oregon offense to take second and slow its relentless pace down just a bit.
In the secondary, the Bears went with 5 defensive backs and played mostly man coverage. They moved players around to create different looks and left one player in at all times to spy on Darron Thomas. This caused problems for Thomas who couldn’t find an open receiver and the Oregon receivers had to battle for each yard because of the coverage downfield. A lot of defense have tried to go with zone defenses and have the players swarm to the ball, which is very difficult because of the speed of the Oregon offense. Playing man coverage and keeping DT in the box and taking away his dangerous scrambling ability gave the Bears a chance to win the game.
Another item that isn’t a defense strategy but may have contributed to the Oregon offense stalling was the constant “injuries” to the Cal defensive players, most of them were backups. Now these “injuries” had the Oregon players upset, many of them saying the Cal defenders were acting “hurt” just to force injury timeouts and slow down the Oregon tempo. Now I am not sure how many Cal players may have actually been hurt or if any of them were simply acting just to slow Oregon down, but this is that likely. Credit must be given to Cal for their gameplan and execution. They came out with a plan, stuck to it, and were able to push the Ducks to the breaking point.