I must admit I’m not a huge listener of college football talk shows, but earlier this week I did catch a good portion of the College Sports Nation program that airs in the afternoons on Sirius XM radio.
On the one particular day I was listening, former Miami and North Carolina coach Butch Davis was talking about the lack of defense in the college game today, and his theory for why so many teams are struggling to stop others caught my attention.
He believes tempo is a big factor - not because defenses can’t line up in time - but rather because defenses are spending most of their time during practice getting lined up instead of pausing between plays to work on the basic fundamentals of gap integrity, pursuit angles and good, old fashioned tackling.