How Colts DC Lou Anarumo Will Scheme Open Laiatu Latu: Overload Fronts

The NFL is a matchup league and Lou Anarumo has been one of the best at scheming plays for his best players.

The NFL is a matchup league. It’s a cliche—but there also is a lot of truth to it. College football has such a wide range of offensive schemes that it’s forced defenses to defend concepts not players. In the NFL, there’s turnover and a focus on putting game-changing players in position to make plays.

Lou Anarumo, as we know, has a flexible system designed to defend the opponent, not the width of the field. Some systems want to get good at running specific coverages and pressures that they know they can execute well on Sundays. Lou, on the other hand, wants to be multiple so that he has all the ammo he needs to defend the opponent schematically.

In his time as a DC he’s done a great job putting his pass rushers in advantageous situations. Trey Hendrickson is one of the leagues best pass rushers, and Lou did a great job putting offenses in a position to pick their poison and let Trey affect game.

Overload Front Structures

As a defensive end, you want the most amount of 1-on-1 rushes that you can get on passing downs. You want to put your hand in the dirt and have a two way go at the offensive tackle.
As an offense this is exactly what you do not want. I do not want Trey Hendrickson 1-on-1 with no help. That’s the chess match.

Besides chip the player, you often see teams do the following:

• Put a TE to the side of the edge rusher creating traffic and eliminating a two way go. He can either Chip and release or free release into the pattern depending on the concept.
• Slide the protection to the edge rusher and have the near tackle overset and force the inside move into the guard looking to help.

Lou likes to force teams to slide the other way so they have to leave Trey 1-on-1 or throw hot.

Let’s take a look at this sack vs. the Steelers last season. The Steelers are in Jet Protection or six man half-slide protection. Half-slide protection is kinda what it sounds like— half the OL is sliding to the gap furthest from the center, while the other side and the RB are man-on-man.

How do you know who is sliding and who’s man-on-man? Well that gets called into the huddle but can change once you get to the line and see the defense’s presentation. When it’s called in the huddle, the base rules are as followed: The OL is responsible for the 4 down lineman and the Will or weak side linebacker. The RB is reading Mike to Sam and then running his route. As a starting point, you want the QB to be most protected where he isn’t looking on his first read— that’s why you slide for the Will.

But as I mentioned, those assignments and rules can change at the line scrimmage. In this case you can see the Bengals come out in an overload front with three down lineman to the side of the center. They’re trying to bait the offense to sliding to that direction—away from Trey.

If they ignored the presentation and slid to the Will anyway (the nickel off the screen) that would make no sense. The angles would be off and you wouldn’t get anyone protected. So the Steelers flip the slide. The Steelers are now sliding to Vonn Bell, who looks like a threat to blitz. That way they have 4 lineman for 5 potential rushers to that side. It’s much more sound, but that’s also exactly what the Bengals want you to do.

Unless you move Friermuth over to the other side of the formation, there’s no way for Dan Moore to have help. The OL has to slide to the other side to account for a potential blitz in the other direction. So unfortunately he’s one-on-one with one of the best pass rushers in the league.

If all you had to do is force the OL to slide away from your best pass rusher, why don’t teams do this every time? Well they do. Lou certainly didn’t invent this front structure.

But basically any other QB that’s a threat to run is why you wouldn’t do this.

You want to balance the rush so that that it best eliminates the escape lanes a QB has. When you put three guys on one side of the center, well it makes it real easy for the QB to escape the opposite way.

That’s why you’ll see these called on third and longs. You want it to obviously be a passing down and also enough space where the second level can rally if the QB does escape.