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Football Film Study: That Last Drive...

The Difficulty of Defending Stanford’s Run Game

How complex is smash mouth football?. If Stanford’s going to put all eleven guys in the box, how many different things can you actually do to try and stop them?

There are a lot of options, as it happens. In this video we look at how DeRuyter went down swinging even as Stanford ran out the clock late in the game. In that mass of TE’s and FB’s there was actually a lot of subtlety, and though we didn’t come out on top, it was encouraging to see our defensive staff match wits with one of the best-called run games in the conference. At the end of the day, we had our chances to get them off the field, but the disparity in execution and raw talent was too much at this stage of our program. We left a lot of yards on the field, and hopefully as our players get more experience and we recruit some more talent we’ll start shutting down drives like this and getting these wins.