Yesterday, surrounded by high school coaches at the Louisiana High School Coaches Association convention in Baton Rouge, LSU defensive coordinator Dave Aranda explained his defensive philosophy.
Ross Dellenger of The Advocate was there to chronicle Aranda's talk, and came away with a very interesting look at how the first-year LSU defensive coordinator interprets defensive schemes. The piece points out that coaching clinics, like the one he was speaking, at have played a major role in his development and education as a play caller.
"All of the major pieces to what we do now, a lot of them came from coaching clinics," Aranda explained.
In Aranda's mind, there are two different types of defenses; one that fights like the 18th-century British forces that lined up and took turns firing at an opposing army lined up across from them, and then there's the guerrilla-style attacks that are versatile and constantly jumping out of the bushes with surprise attacks.
Aranda made a name for himself at previous stops like Hawaii, Utah State and Wisconsin, using the guerrilla warfare approach in situations where you may find your squad short on talent or numbers and can't quite go toe-to-toe, so he decided to to create confusion and force the offense to hesitate pre and post-snap, keeping them constantly off balance.
When asked what his first defense will look like at LSU this fall, Aranda noted, "If we feel confident in our roles and confident in what’s being asked of us, we’ve got the ability to be successful to line up and do what we do." And if they're not, they can always go the guerrilla warfare route.
“The defense’s premise is built on deception, so that’s naturally going to be there. Once we can build upon the three calls we have, that’s going to lend itself to more zipping and zapping and misdirection, if you will.”
Head here to read more from Aranda, including more details about his unique defensive approach that uses pop culture references.