Yale takes pride in 3rd-down defense
Yale held Penn to three conversions on 14 thirddown tries on Saturday at the Bowl.
And the Bulldogs have been good enough on third down this year that Saturday’s performance actually hurt their overall percentage. A little.
Yale leads FCS teams in third-down defense, allowing opponents to convert just 21.3 percent of chances. Throughout NCAA football, only three Division III teams have a better percentage.
Bulldogs defensive lineman Reid Nickerson said Tuesday on the team’s weekly media call that the defense, led by defensive coordinator Sean McGowan, has enjoyed preparing to stop third-down plays.
“Coach McGowan has really drawn up a lot of very interesting third-down packages that we get to run which we always love,” Nickerson said. “We’ve got a lot of a lot of really fast, really agile pass rushers on the field all at the same time. And they do a great job of installing a bunch of blitzes every week that are brand new.”
It helps on third down that the Bulldogs (3-3, 2-1 Ivy League after Saturday’s 42-28 win) rank pretty well in several overall statistics, too.
They’re 13th of 123 teams
in FCS in total defense, 281.2 yards a game. They’re 19th in scoring defense at 18.3 points a game.
Their 3.5 sacks average ranks them seventh (Nickerson has four, and Clay Patterson’s nine solos are tied for second), and they’re tied for seventh with 8.0 tackles per game for a loss.
“Every week we’re coming at people with a brandnew third-down look, which usually throws them for a good loop,” Nickerson said.
“That’s why I think we’ve seen a lot of success on
third down. It’s been a lot of fun, just the creativity of all of our different blitzes and packages and just being able to execute those has been really fun this year.”
Yale has four games remaining and still has its own Ivy-title destiny in its hands, part of a four-way tie a game behind unbeaten Princeton in league play.
Next up on Saturday at home is East Haven’s Al Bagnoli’s Columbia team (5-1, 2-1), which shut out Dartmouth on Friday.
“Week after week, we’ve emphasized really that it’s really just us versus us,” Nickerson said. “If the defense goes out there and executes like we know we can, then we’re going to be fine, as we’ve shown throughout the year. Whenever we go out there and we’re a little loose with our execution, that’s when we can run into some trouble.”
Two Bulldogs earned honors from the Ivy League. Quarterback Nolan Grooms got the nod as offensive player of the week after throwing for 283 yards and two touchdowns and running for 113 and two scores in his first start.
And punter Jack Bosman got the special-teams honor, going 6 for 6 on pointafter kicks and putting one of his three second-half punts inside the 20. He ranks in the top 20 in FCS with a 42.4 punting average.
Bosman was asked if he would rather a busier punting workload after not being needed for that task in the first half. “I’d like to keep busy with PATs,” he said. “Those are my favorite thing to do.”