Return to West Virginia roots pays off for Mountaineers defense

George Schroeder | USA TODAY Sports

Show Caption Hide Caption Five games you can't miss in Week 5 of college football USA TODAY Sports' George Schroeder offers up the five games you can't miss this week.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The very first thing the new defensive coordinator wanted to do was to reinstall an important piece of the program’s culture.

“I want to go back to the 3-3-5,” Tony Gibson recalls telling Dana Holgorsen back in February 2014.

The reasons all made good football sense. Three seasons into Holgorsen’s tenure as head coach, competing against all those high-scoring Big 12 offenses in games that had sometimes become laughable, West Virginia desperately needed to find a way to play better defense. But there was also this:

“It’s just the right fit,” Gibson says.

And as it’s currently being played, it’s very good defense. As No. 21 West Virginia opens Big 12 play Saturday at No. 14 Oklahoma, the Mountaineers are allowing 7.7 points and grabbing three turnovers a game, leading the nation in both categories.

Credit goes to a fast, swarming group of veteran players led by hybrid safeties Karl Joseph and K.J. Dillon. But the unusual scheme — this is far too simple, but it’s essentially a very aggressive version of nickel defense, all the time — well, if you know anything about West Virginia’s recent past and the Big 12’s current makeup … it just fits.

“We’re built for speed,” Holgorsen says of the Mountaineers’ defense. “Being in the Big 12, you need speed on the field.”

The 3-3-5 as West Virginia’s distinctive scheme was born back in 2002, after Rich Rodriguez’s first team went 3-8, and in part to maximize the kind of talent the Mountaineers could attract. Like many other schools that typically reside below college football’s most elite tier, recruiting defensive linemen was then and remains an especially difficult proposition. After switching defenses, the Mountaineers concentrated on versatile athletes, including quarterbacks and running backs who could be converted to defensive backs.

Before making the change, Rodriguez and most of the defensive staff (including Gibson, who was coaching defensive backs) embarked on a trip to Wake Forest to consult with Dean Hood (then Wake Forest’s defensive coordinator, now Eastern Kentucky’s head coach), who was running a 3-3-5. They drove to South Carolina, where Charlie Strong (now Texas’ head coach) had turned a nickel package into his base defense. They consulted with Joe Lee Dunn, who was at Mississippi State and had been employing exotic defenses including the 3-3-5. And then they returned to Morgantown and tweaked and tugged until West Virginia’s peculiar version emerged.

For the next few years, even after Rodriguez left for Michigan, West Virginia football was defined in part by what Gibson calls an “oddball” scheme. Reinstalled, the unpredictable, aggressive defense is especially suited to counter some of the Big 12’s wide-open passing attacks. The Mountaineers will play man-to-man or zone. They’ll drop eight defenders into coverage, or they'll rush seven. Gibson, a native of Van, W.Va., who had played for Rodriguez at Glenville State, says the scheme includes at least one blitz for every player except the field (wide-side) cornerback.

“We’re all over the place with it,” Gibson says. “Hopefully, with it being such an oddball, it’s hard to prepare for.”

That’s another significant positive. Although every defense has a nickel package, almost no one runs the 3-3-5 as a base defense, and certainly not the West Virginia version. Along with the Mountaineers, there’s Arizona, where Rodriguez is still using it. Among Power Five teams, that’s it. As a result, in much the same way that Georgia Tech’s option offense is tough for defenses to tackle because they rarely see anything like it, West Virginia’s defense can be difficult for offenses to prepare for in a three- or four-day period.

“We used to have a unique (offensive) system at Texas Tech,” Holgorsen says. “If you look at what we’re doing offensively compared to everybody else, we’re pretty similar, so being able to be a little different on defense may give us some kind of advantage.”

But when Gibson returned to Morgantown in 2013 to coach the safeties, the Mountaineers were running a 3-4, which isn’t all that different than many other teams but also isn’t very similar at all to the 3-3-5.

“It just seems weird if West Virginia is not running this defense,” Gibson says. “It’s almost part of your culture here to be in this defense, to have a spread offense and an odd defense.”

In the most recent past, what’s odd is the idea that West Virginia is playing good defense. As one might expect given Holgorsen’s background in the Air Raid spread, the Mountaineers have been prolific scoring — but for a while, they were giving up about as many points. In 2011, Holgorsen’s first season, the Mountaineers were 10-3 and won the Orange Bowl, beating Clemson 70-33. But the next two seasons, as they transitioned from the Big East to the Big 12, were more difficult; against those high-powered spread offenses, West Virginia allowed 38.1 points a game in 2012 (No. 117 nationally) and 33.3 in 2013 (No. 99).

Among the lingering lowlights was a victory.

When West Virginia beat Baylor 70-63 in 2012, the game became a caricature of everything critics suspected about the Big 12. The next season, Baylor won 73-42. West Virginia went 4-8. During the offseason, after defensive coordinator Keith Patterson left for Arizona State, Holgorsen promoted Gibson, who told his boss he wanted to go back to what had worked before.

If those games against Baylor were emblematic of the Mountaineers’ defensive struggles in recent years, their success against the Bears last season was notable. In a 41-27 upset victory, West Virginia held Baylor to its lowest output in both points and yards (318 total yards was 263.5 below its eventual season average).

With 10 defensive starters returning, including Joseph and Dillon at the important “bandit” and “spur” safety positions, the Mountaineers expected to field a very good defense this season. So far, that seems to be the case, though the competition so far — Georgia Southern, Liberty and Maryland — hasn’t exactly been a true test.

“I really like where our kids are at,” Gibson says. “We needed early success to get their confidence up and get going. … I think our kids are excited to get into Big 12 play.”

The Big 12 figures to be a different animal, which brings us to Oklahoma.

A year ago, the Sooners came to Morgantown early in the season and unveiled a little-known freshman running back. Samaje Perine was listed as a reserve; he played in part because of injuries above him on the depth chart. He ran for 242 yards and four touchdowns on 34 carries, mostly between the tackles.

“We physically got beat up,” Gibson says. “They were more physical. They punched us in the mouth. We didn’t respond. We can’t let that happen again this weekend.”

The bludgeoning seemed like validation for those who consider the 3-3-5 inadequate to stop physical running games. In 2014, West Virginia allowed an average of 162 rushing yards, which ranked No. 65 nationally. The counter is that with only three linemen, the Mountaineers can put athletic players on the field and then swarm.

“We feel with what we do and how we do it that we would rather have more speed on the field,” Gibson says. “We’ve got eight athletes out there on their feet seeing the ball. We’re gonna get off blocks and get as many guys to the football as we can.”

And they’ve got something that’s distinctively their own.

“It was branded here,” Gibson says. “It’s our makeup.”

THIS WEEK'S 10 BEST COLLEGE FOOTBALL GAMES