Rattlers Have to Remain on the Defensive
Patrick Daly
Saturday June 12, 2004
If you want to win the ArenaBowl you better have it. While the Arena Football League is designed to be offense friendly, it’s still the old mantra that holds true: defense wins championships.
So, how do you stop an offense that ranked at the top of the league during the regular season? For the Arizona Rattlers, that question was answered with a 59-42 quarterfinal victory over the high-flying Los Angeles Avengers. Now the job is to stop the next team on the schedule, the Colorado Crush.
Before we get to that, how did the Rattlers hold the potent Avenger offense to 42 points?
“It sounds simple,” said Rattlers defensive coordinator Doug Plank. “I don’t understand why more teams don’t try to do this against this LA offense. They are so good there is not one defense in the league that matches up with their offense out in the open field. We’ve been involved in 80-point games with this team and I don’t like it as a defensive coach.
“That taught me that we don’t need to be playing man coverage against this team in the open field. I know it looks boring, and the fans get very frustrated with it, it’s like having a toothache. We make them throw five- and 10-yard passes all the way down the field and then we are hopefully going to stop them inside the 20-yard line. That’s the only strategy that I can think of that would possibly work against this offense.”
In even simpler terms, it means, as Rattlers WR/LB Hunkie Cooper put it, “trading six yards for a headache.” With Colorado coming to town, Crush OS Damian Harrell will be a target of that headache. Like Avengers OS Chris Jackson, Harrell is a huge part of the offensive scheme for the Crush, and he’s generally at the end of big plays that start on the arm of Crush QB John Dutton.
“Against LA, that’s what we wanted,” said Cooper about the team’s defensive game plan. “LA is a quick-strike offense. They want to go one play, two plays, and score. What we wanted to do was force them to use their red-zone offense because they don’t a get a lot of opportunities to work on it during the season because they score so often from the middle of the field. What we tried to do was keep them in front of us — six or seven plays — and just try to get licks on their guys. I know this, the more you become physical with their guys by the fourth quarter they don’t have it.
“So that’s what we’re going to do. We want to be able to go out and show them different looks and try to slow down some of Dutton’s reads. He’s an excellent quarterback, he reads quickly, but what we have to do is cause confusion and cause a little hesitation, and more than anything, not miss any tackles in this game to be successful.”
Step Up
In the playoffs, you’ll often find someone who’s stepped their game up a notch. In the first round, Rattlers WR/DB Orshawante Bryant was that player. In the win over Los Angeles, Bryant set a team playoff record with 13 catches. Here’s a player that had 43 catches in the regular season, played the defensive specialist position when called upon, and has now produced in the two-way spot with WR/DB Randy Gatewood out of the lineup.
“Orshawante, he’s been coming along each and every week,” said Rattlers QB Sherdrick Bonner. “With the absence of Gatewood, he stepped his game up a couple of levels and made some huge plays for us when we needed them.”
“It was just the way the defense played,” said Bryant. “They came out with something different than we expected during practice. It just so happened that it allowed me to get open a little bit more often.”
The opportunity to make those plays comes as a result of Bonner finding the open man. Unlike some offenses, the Rattlers don’t build the game plan around one player. Rather, it’s built to create opportunities based on how the defense reacts. This past Sunday, it was Bryant’s chance to make plays and he made the most of it. Against Colorado, it could just as easily be Cooper, WR/LB Tom Pace or OS Siaha Burley.
“On any given day, in this offense anybody can become a star,” said Cooper. “That’s what you do; you take what they give you. They were giving us the little hitch and Orshawante was the recipient of it. You take what they give you as long as you can, and then when they make a mistake and blow a coverage you go up top on them. All I know is that five first downs in this game is a touchdown, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”
Measuring Success
In most sports, there’s one universal measurement of success, particularly at the team level, and that’s winning a championship.
“There’s one goal,” said White. “Our goal from the beginning of the season was to get home field advantage. We got that. There’s now one goal, and that is not to get to the ArenaBowl, not to win a playoff game, it’s to win the ArenaBowl. Nothing, short of that, will be considered a successful season. I don’t care how many games we win in a row; anything short of the championship will be an unsuccessful season.”
However, before the Rattlers can think about the ArenaBowl, they have to avoid overlooking a Colorado team that’s already made an impressive turnaround in just their second season. With that in mind, it’s up to the experienced Arizona players to keep this team from overlooking the next step.
“There’s no way to overlook it, because if we don’t win this week we don’t go to the ArenaBowl,” said Cooper. “That’s what your veteran players are for; to make sure you don’t overlook it. It’s not about June 27th right now. Right now, it’s about Sunday at noon, facing a Colorado team that beat us earlier in the year.”
Patrick Daly has been an Arena Football League enthusiast since he first stumbled across the late-night ESPN broadcasts and has followed the Arizona Rattlers since their inaugural season in 1992. He graduated from Arizona State University with an engineering degree and is currently a member of a web development team for Direct Alliance in Tempe. Patrick currently resides in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler, Arizona with his beautiful wife, son and a very large football helmet collection.
