Couch: Dantonio shows progressive side implementing rugby tackling

EAST LANSING — Mark Dantonio thus far has only joked about traveling to faraway lands to recruit rugby players to his Michigan State football team.

The odds of the Bullough family being replaced by Brits or Aussies or Kiwis are — in keeping with the spirit of this sentence — close to nil.

But Dantonio is damn serious about infusing rugby into his program — specifically tackling techniques.

Inspired by the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and a rugby-tackling techniques video assembled by their coach, Pete Carroll, Dantonio is part of a growing but small group of college football coaches who’ve turned to rugby to teach the art of tackling.

The reasons are both competitive and important. First, to improve their teams’ ability to tackle in space. And, perhaps with larger and lasting ramifications, to take the head out of these collisions.

“I had kind of heard about it secondhand,” Dantonio said. “But then I watched the video. We came in as a defensive staff and said, ‘We’re going to go back through all 900-plus plays (from last year), find those 900 tackles and then we’re going to go through every one of them and we’re going to evaluate what kind of tackle that was. Then put it on a teaching film and then teach our players about those six different (techniques).”

This sort of progressive thinking from a 59-year-old coach who’s won plenty and done so with dominating defense is another characteristic that sets Dantonio apart.

This wasn’t just a Saturday seminar for his players or some take-home recommended iPad viewing. This marked a daily change to routine.

“It’s been stressed almost every day, anytime we do a tackling drill, all through summer, all through winter,” MSU senior safety RJ Williamson said. “We watched videos on rugby tackling and watched the Seahawks. The Seahawks were a big team we watched how they tackled and implemented some things, like hawk tackling, rolling, wrapping and squeezing. It brings guys down a lot faster.”

A lot of wrapping and squeezing, sometimes driving legs, sometimes rolling, a shoulder to the hips or the chest or the thigh. Six different tackling techniques in all.

“I think it’s helped us a lot in terms of tackling in space,” senior linebacker Darien Harris said, “coming at different angles, whether you’re head-up on a guy or coming from the side, whether you’re coming after engaging a block.”

These techniques weren’t entirely foreign to MSU’s players — just without label and detailed intention.

“What we saw is we’re naturally doing those tackles already,” Dantonio said. “We can put them right into categories that (Carroll) had — that’s a very good job of this, that’s a very good job of that, hawk tackle, hawk roll tackle. Now the challenge was, so how do we get better?”

The 20-plus minute instructional video narrated by Carroll features a mix of the Seahawks’ best technical tackles with similar takedowns in rugby. Ohio State reportedly adopted the techniques before their 2014 national championship season. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Washington and Florida have also introduced rugby tackling.

“Rugby players have taken the head of out of tackling and truly exemplified shoulder tackling,” Carroll says early in the video.

In this new era of concussion awareness in which the viability of football is being threatened for the first time in a century, it makes sense to look to a collision sport — played without helmets — that’s survived in some form for nearly 400 years.

“It’s amazing the little amount of concussions they have without playing with pads and a helmet on,” Harris said. “It just comes down to technique … and not using your head. And I think, over the years, that’s going to be more and more emphasized in youth football because of the issues we’re seeing with concussions.”

Rugby isn’t the concussion-free playground it’s believed by some to be. And the sport is behind the NFL in terms of reacting. As recently as 2011, the English, for example, didn’t require a head injury assessment and substitution after head trauma. Once the policy was implemented, more than half of the players previously being cleared to continue were diagnosed with a concussion.

But, combine ever-evolving American football helmets with no-helmet rugby tackling techniques and perhaps football has its answer — with Dantonio and Co. among those at the forefront of finding out.

“We haven’t had a problem with concussions, that’s a big thing,” said MSU junior offensive tackle Jack Conklin, who along with several teammates visited with rugby players during a study abroad program in Australia this summer. “You see those guys over there, they don’t have any pads or helmets. They keep their heads out of the tackle, it’s all shoulder and bringing their legs through. You see that happening in our defense more because they’ve studied that and put that in effect. Not seeing the concussions this year is a big sign it’s paying forward.”

“Everybody’s always trying to find the nuances to make themselves better,” Dantonio said. “And when there’s something you’re not doing well, you go back to the basis, ‘OK, let’s start over. How’s that done?’ We’ve been a good tackling team. I don’t know about last week, but we’ve been a good tackling team. But I just think you go back, re-evaluate how you’re teaching things, critique it and that was just one of the first things we critiqued.”

Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.