How one key coaching approach allowed Oklahoma State defense to ‘lock in and play fast’
Summary
Pick/market: Immediately after the game, Oklahoma State coach Eric Morris wasn't sure exactly what he saw when defensive end James Williams raced in to gobble up the Oregon fumble to seal the Cowboys' 39-31 win...
Immediately after the game, Oklahoma State coach Eric Morris wasn't sure exactly what he saw when defensive end James Williams raced in to gobble up the Oregon fumble to seal the Cowboys' 39-31 win on Saturday at Boone Pickens Stadium.
But Morris knew he saw one key factor: Williams was playing fast.
"I don't know if he's doing the right thing off the ball, but he saw that ball, and he was there so damn fast," Morris said.
Williams' fast attack spoke to a much larger focus for the Cowboys that helped produce one of the biggest wins in the first two weeks of the college football season.
Morris and defensive coordinator Skyler Cassity simply asked their defenders to play fast.
"That's the only thing I'm grading them on," Morris said. "We're going to have to chart literally every player that plays in every play of this game. It's going to say 'fast,' or 'not fast,' and that's how he's graded.
"No technique. I'm not allowing a coach to put one more thing on it. Usually, we come in here and we have a laundry list of things, and I thought it was kind of getting too much. Like I wanted guys to be able to go out there and just execute and see it. And playing fast is mental too."
It's mental, not only on game day, but in preparation as well.
"Coach Morris said, 'I don't care about anything you guys do, just play fast,'" Williams said. "That was important. If the defensive line sets the tempo and how the game is going to be dictated, of course it's gonna go great.
"You can see on film against Tulsa there's a lot of hesitation, there's a lot of moving parts. Once he got rid of all the outside BS, we were able to lock in and play fast."
On top of that, a key revelation by Cassity and his defensive staff helped the Cowboys predict what Oregon was doing.
"We were noticing earlier in the week that their offensive line had tendencies that helped us key into run/pass and a couple areas we could take advantage of, and obviously our defensive line was keyed into that," linebacker Tate Romney said. "Their offensive line had a few stance indicators for most of the time run/pass."
With that knowledge and the focus to play fast, the Cowboys unleashed their potential and erased the Tulsa loss a week later.
"We knew that wasn't our team," linebacker Ethan Wesloski said. "We knew that we're so much better than that, and we knew that everything that happened negative last Saturday was the result of our lack of execution.
"Today was all about playing fast. Play fast, play vertical, trust what you see, trust your eyes, let it loose. You had nothing to lose today, so go let it loose."
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