Hokies' Defense Looking to Stem the Tide of Big Plays Against Duke

If you're trying to find one difference between the Hokies' defense and the Blue Devils', look no further than how each unit handles explosive plays.

Despite all their myriad struggles this season, Tech still rates very well when you examine the stat sheet.

After all, the Hokies still rank 31st in the country in yards allowed per game, and third in the nation in Football Outsiders' Fremeau Efficiency Index, an opponent-adjusted measure of defensive efficiency.

By contrast, Duke comes in at 71st in the former category, yet 14th in the latter. The difference, and a big part of the reason the Devils sit at the top of the ACC Coastal and the Hokies at the bottom? Explosive plays.

"That kind of encapsulates our whole season right there," said defensive tackle Corey Marshall. "Big plays will kill you if you don't knock them out."

He's exactly right; opponents have trouble sustaining drives against the Hokies, but they certainly can hit on big plays, seemingly at the worst possible moments for the team.

The Hokies have allowed 56 total plays for gains of 20 yards or more this year, a number that puts them at 118th in the nation. Strangely enough, they've been particularly bad at containing big running plays.

Bud Foster's bunch has allowed 27 running plays of 20+ yards, putting them second to last in the country at 127th overall.

They've been better against the pass, even excluding disasters like the ECU game, allowing 29 pass plays of 20+ yards to rank 63rd in the FBS.

Yet their issues with big plays really becomes apparent in the advanced numbers. Football Outsiders' explosive drive efficiency metric, which measures the percentage of opponent's drives that average at least 10 yards per play, makes this perfectly clear.

It shows that roughly 16.2 percent of all of Tech's opponent's drives meet that worrying threshold. That's 91st in the nation.

The ugly results were on display once more two weeks ago against Boston College.

The Eagles totaled 368 yards on the day on 62 plays. They gained 98 yards on 55 of those plays. They gained the remaining 270 yards on just seven that went for 20 yards or more.

"We'll have a game where like 50 plays, a team will have a hundred yards, and on three, four, five plays, they'll have a hundred," said cornerback Kendall Fuller.

So it would seem the problem is obvious. What's less clear is how the Hokies can fix it.

"You can't play superhero football," Marshall said. "You've just got to play your position, not three other guys' positions, we just have to focus on our basics and try to focus on wrapping and flying around."

As the coaches have been saying over and over, the problem doesn't seem to be the scheme. Instead, it's more about young players not trusting Foster's plan, and trying to do too much, a tempting option as the season winds down and things get desperate.

"Trying to be a hero can definitely cost you sometimes," said defensive end Dadi Nicolas. "But at the same time, trying to be a hero, you can be a hero."

For young guys like Nicolas, it's a matter of recognizing when those big mistakes happen to learn when the defense can't afford for individual players to strap on a cape.

"I definitely have plays where it was my fault," Nicolas said. "What I try to do is take notes, make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm a student of the game, we all are."

Luckily for the Hokies, big plays don't seem to be Duke's specialty.

The Blue Devils only have 31 plays of 20+ yards to their credit, occupying the 110th spot in the country, with only 11 of those coming on runs (71st in the nation).

As for explosive drives, only 12.4 percent of their drives move downfield quickly, good for 70th overall.

"If we can stay with them, stay within our scheme, not try to reach too much, to overcompensate for everything, we'll be fine," Marshall said.

That's not to say that the Devils are incapable of game-changing plays. WR Jamison Crowder ranks T-79th in the nation with 10 plays of 20 yards or more by himself.

"Duke, you've seen it, they've had one hitter quitters and knocked teams out and moved them out of the way," Marshall said.

Even still, Duke's not on the same level as some of the other opponents to trouble the Hokies with explosive plays.

After all, Georgia Tech is 14th in the country in explosive drives. Miami is right behind at 15th, while East Carolina is 35th and even Boston College is 47th.

So there is potential for the Hokies to have success against Duke if it doesn't help the Blue Devils with some of the mistakes that characterized the defense's struggles.

"It's just little things that we can fix, the big plays that we're giving up that we can fix," Fuller said.

The Hokies will also surely be buoyed by memories of the crushing 13-10 loss to the Devils in Lane Stadium last season.

"There's a chip on my shoulder, of course, because of the way we lost," Nicolas said. "It was close, it came down to the fourth quarter, the last minute of the game, so we definitely felt that game."

Nicolas remembers the game especially well, as it was his first career start, coming in in place of the suspended J.R. Collins. Yet the end to the game made it equally memorable.

"I remember like it was yesterday," Nicolas said. "It came down to a fourth down conversion."

With a little over three minutes left in the game, down three points, the Hokies called timeout after forcing a fourth down on their own 44-yard line. Duke decided to go for it, and picked up the yard they needed to run the clock and keep the ball out of Logan Thomas' hands for a painfully close loss.

"Studying them, that was the first thing I put in, last year's film, just to get those emotions again," Nicolas said.

Instead of playing in front of a packed Lane crowd in an afternoon game as they did a season ago, the Hokies head to Durham for a noon matchup. That was once a potentially troubling factor, given how dead Wallace-Wade Stadium tended to be when football was an afterthought for Duke students, but the players may have to face a considerably more energetic crowd this time around.

"I was out there when they were strictly a basketball school and there were a couple fans in the stands," Marshall said. "That whole dynamic has changed. You watch them on TV, it's an intense atmosphere, it's hype, so we're going to prepare for that."

Going into that re-energized environment and beating the 19th-ranked team in the country would erase many of those bad memories from 2013.

If the Hokies can indeed limit those troublesome big plays, then they've got a shot at reviving the good feelings generated by the last time they beat a ranked opponent.

"We look real fast out there, so we need to take this practice like we did that Ohio State week and kind of translate it to the game," Marshall said.