I do not look forward to UGA coming to Knoxville.
The Georgia Bulldogs Want to Wreak Havoc on Opponents
Bulldogs football coach Kirby Smart says he wants his defense to cause chaos on at least 20% of its plays
In the three months Georgia football coach Kirby Smart spent stewing after his team’s 28-21 Sugar Bowl loss to Texas in January, he came up with a novel idea to improve his defense: a Socratic dialogue about havoc with a locker room full of college football players.
On each day of spring practice, a player in the defensive room was selected at random to explain the football statistic “havoc rate.” The stat measures the percentage of defensive plays that result in negative yards, such as forced fumbles, sacks, tackles-for-loss, passes broken up and interceptions.
“Everybody in that room, from the highest SAT/ACT to the lowest, has got to stand up and give us what havoc rate is,” Smart said after a spring practice in early April. “If they understand what it is, they know we’re trying to cause it.”
The word has become so ubiquitous in Athens that Georgia’s defensive corps bring it up unprompted, as redshirt freshman linebacker Azeez Ojulari did in a news conference following the team’s first pre-season scrimmage in August. When asked to predict how versatile the Bulldog defense would be in 2019, he said “I think this is a team that can wreak havoc this year, just do damage to different teams.”
As No. 3 Georgia prepares to host No. 7 Notre Dame on Saturday night, creating more havoc has become the central goal of the Bulldogs’ defense in 2019. The Georgia defense ranked 15th in the country in team defense last year, but they were 10th in the Southeastern Conference in interceptions and second-to-last in tackles-for-loss, with 65. Due to those subpar statistics, Georgia’s havoc rate in 2018 was just 15.6%, 73rd best in the nation.
Meanwhile, the two teams that contended for last season’s national championship boasted far more disruptive defenses: Alabama created havoc on 21.2% of its plays while Clemson did so on 21% in 2018.
The glaring gap between Georgia and college football’s current royalty made it clear that the Bulldog defense needed to inflict more chaos. So began the Kirby Smart listening tour of 2019.
In the weeks following the Sugar Bowl, Smart and his staff studied the 10 programs with the highest havoc rates last season, eventually expanding their analysis to include any program whose tackles-for-loss total ranked in the top-20. They made stops at several universities, including Clemson, Michigan and Miami, whose 24.2% havoc rate in 2018 was the best in college football, and peppered their peers with questions.
“We’re trying to do some of the things they do and we’re trying to put guys in position to do that,” said Smart at the beginning of spring training in mid-March. Specifically, he wants his defense to wreak havoc on at least 20% of its plays.
To get the defense to increase the frequency of its havoc plays by more than 30%, Smart knew he had to try new tactics—hence the locker-room dialogues. Players, who previously heard Smart wax on about the importance of stuffing the run, took to the havoc mantra quickly. Within the first three games of the 2019 season, Georgia’s havoc rate has soared by over 58%.
“I kid you not. Literally every day we stand up, we chart how many yards we give up, we talk about havoc, every day,” said Reed, who returned a fumble for a touchdown against Murray State. “When you preach that, it’s going to happen.”
And happen it has. Georgia’s defense has tallied 47 negative plays, 20 of which came against Arkansas State last week. Its havoc rate, currently at 24.7%, has trended upwards every week.
What’s particularly scary about that statistic is that it likely hasn’t peaked: Georgia’s defensive starters have yet to play a full sixty minutes. Almost every Bulldog on the roster has taken snaps this season—85 played in Georgia’s 63-17 win over Murray State and 86 saw action in last Saturday’s 55-0 shutout of Arkansas State. That suggests that any player on the defense is capable of causing a disruption.
That could be a problem for Notre Dame, because the Fighting Irish offense is particularly susceptible to giving up yards. Though Notre Dame went undefeated in the regular season in 2018, its opponents successfully executed havoc plays 18% of the time--two percentage points higher than the national average.
This year the Irish offense has been less prone to havoc—14% of its plays against Louisville and New Mexico yielded negative progress. That’s not saying much, however, considering those opponents have the No. 29- and No. 130-ranked defenses, respectively. Georgia’s havoc-heavy defense, meanwhile, is ranked ninth.
As Notre Dame quarterback Ian Book predicts about Saturday’s game, “It’s going to be a hostile environment.”
The Georgia Bulldogs Want to Wreak Havoc on Opponents
Bulldogs football coach Kirby Smart says he wants his defense to cause chaos on at least 20% of its plays
In the three months Georgia football coach Kirby Smart spent stewing after his team’s 28-21 Sugar Bowl loss to Texas in January, he came up with a novel idea to improve his defense: a Socratic dialogue about havoc with a locker room full of college football players.
On each day of spring practice, a player in the defensive room was selected at random to explain the football statistic “havoc rate.” The stat measures the percentage of defensive plays that result in negative yards, such as forced fumbles, sacks, tackles-for-loss, passes broken up and interceptions.
“Everybody in that room, from the highest SAT/ACT to the lowest, has got to stand up and give us what havoc rate is,” Smart said after a spring practice in early April. “If they understand what it is, they know we’re trying to cause it.”
The word has become so ubiquitous in Athens that Georgia’s defensive corps bring it up unprompted, as redshirt freshman linebacker Azeez Ojulari did in a news conference following the team’s first pre-season scrimmage in August. When asked to predict how versatile the Bulldog defense would be in 2019, he said “I think this is a team that can wreak havoc this year, just do damage to different teams.”
As No. 3 Georgia prepares to host No. 7 Notre Dame on Saturday night, creating more havoc has become the central goal of the Bulldogs’ defense in 2019. The Georgia defense ranked 15th in the country in team defense last year, but they were 10th in the Southeastern Conference in interceptions and second-to-last in tackles-for-loss, with 65. Due to those subpar statistics, Georgia’s havoc rate in 2018 was just 15.6%, 73rd best in the nation.
Meanwhile, the two teams that contended for last season’s national championship boasted far more disruptive defenses: Alabama created havoc on 21.2% of its plays while Clemson did so on 21% in 2018.
The glaring gap between Georgia and college football’s current royalty made it clear that the Bulldog defense needed to inflict more chaos. So began the Kirby Smart listening tour of 2019.
In the weeks following the Sugar Bowl, Smart and his staff studied the 10 programs with the highest havoc rates last season, eventually expanding their analysis to include any program whose tackles-for-loss total ranked in the top-20. They made stops at several universities, including Clemson, Michigan and Miami, whose 24.2% havoc rate in 2018 was the best in college football, and peppered their peers with questions.
“We’re trying to do some of the things they do and we’re trying to put guys in position to do that,” said Smart at the beginning of spring training in mid-March. Specifically, he wants his defense to wreak havoc on at least 20% of its plays.
To get the defense to increase the frequency of its havoc plays by more than 30%, Smart knew he had to try new tactics—hence the locker-room dialogues. Players, who previously heard Smart wax on about the importance of stuffing the run, took to the havoc mantra quickly. Within the first three games of the 2019 season, Georgia’s havoc rate has soared by over 58%.
“I kid you not. Literally every day we stand up, we chart how many yards we give up, we talk about havoc, every day,” said Reed, who returned a fumble for a touchdown against Murray State. “When you preach that, it’s going to happen.”
And happen it has. Georgia’s defense has tallied 47 negative plays, 20 of which came against Arkansas State last week. Its havoc rate, currently at 24.7%, has trended upwards every week.
What’s particularly scary about that statistic is that it likely hasn’t peaked: Georgia’s defensive starters have yet to play a full sixty minutes. Almost every Bulldog on the roster has taken snaps this season—85 played in Georgia’s 63-17 win over Murray State and 86 saw action in last Saturday’s 55-0 shutout of Arkansas State. That suggests that any player on the defense is capable of causing a disruption.
That could be a problem for Notre Dame, because the Fighting Irish offense is particularly susceptible to giving up yards. Though Notre Dame went undefeated in the regular season in 2018, its opponents successfully executed havoc plays 18% of the time--two percentage points higher than the national average.
This year the Irish offense has been less prone to havoc—14% of its plays against Louisville and New Mexico yielded negative progress. That’s not saying much, however, considering those opponents have the No. 29- and No. 130-ranked defenses, respectively. Georgia’s havoc-heavy defense, meanwhile, is ranked ninth.
As Notre Dame quarterback Ian Book predicts about Saturday’s game, “It’s going to be a hostile environment.”
