re: Honest poll on the defense

I honestly don't have a clue.

Maybe, it's all houses fault.

Maybe, it's all the position coaches' fault.

Maybe, it's all the players' fault.

Likely, it's a combination of all three. That said, I would personally put most of the blame on the position coaches.

In my eyes we will know what went wrong if Matt House is retained. I also trust that Brian Kelly will fire House without hesitation if he believes this defense's problem was the defensive coordinator. Should house be retained then I have a strong feeling it's going to be the fault of the position coaches, which I personally think was the problem. Coordinators have very little hands on time with the players unless they are also responsible for a position group, which in that case they only spend that time with that position group. In House's case he was also the linebackers coach, which weren't great but that was mostly due to poor tackling/effort. The positions he wasn't coaching directly were much worse in my opinion. The d-line was terrible, the safeties were bad, and the corners were non-existant. Schematically we were fine prior to losing Greg Brooks. It was mostly a tackling and talent issue against FSU, but the d-line was still bad in that game. Once we lost our uperclass secondary players, things got really bad. The new guys were so fundamentally inept, had poor communication, and consistently busted assignments. The fundamentals, poor communication, and busted assignments is 100% on the position coaches. It's not Matt House's responsibility to teach the players his scheme, it's his assistant's responsibility to teach House's scheme to the players.

House had a very good scheme and called great plays in 2022, our biggest flaw was blown assignment (this goes back to the coaching staff). But he also had a veteran defense in 2022. With veteran leaders and fundamentally sound players, all they needed to learn was the new scheme. In 2023, we lost basically every leader. Then their replacements, while talented, didn't have strong fundamentals which needed to be taught. To me it looks like the assistant coaches were bad at teaching fundamentals, and bad at teaching the scheme/playcalls (even more blown assignments in 2023).

Once you add all these issues together you are left with a team that doesn't know what the frick they're doing. Out of position constantly, blowing assignments, and then on top off all that missing tackles. So what happens, House simplifies the defense to try to make up for the grocery list of short comings his team had.

I also think Matt House messed up. I don't think he had a clue on what to do with such a fundamentally inept and poorly coached defense. In his eyes he decided playing simple prevent defense would reduce the bleeding and let the offense keep you in games. I think that was a bad choice and directly lost us games.

With good position coaches to teach his scheme and fundamentals, from a play calling perspective I think Matt House is a good defensive coordinator.