Eagles New Secondary Coach Cory Undlin Is A Breath of Fresh Air

One of the most impressive things I’ve seen in the 2015 Eagles is new defensive back coach Cory Undlin.  Eagles veteran safety Malcolm Jenkins made a big deal of what Undlin was doing in the OTA workouts and said his arrival was the best change that was made in the secondary this offseason.  It was also a roundabout way of saying there was incompetence in the Eagles 2014 secondary coaching.

I agree with him wholeheartedly.  I’ve been totally furious to see defensive backs walk up on wide receivers, then open up and let the receiver release into their routes without jamming them and delaying their release.  It makes no sense.

I saw Eagles cornerbacks Bradley Fletcher and Cary Williams do this last year and the year before that a million times or so it seemed.  I don’t claim to know everything about football, but I know how important it is to disrupt the routes of the receivers and the timing of the offense.

There’s obviously a lot of incompetence amongst the defensive coaches in the National Football League.  Many defenses don’t jam the receivers at all.  This is stupid.  Jamming the receivers gives your defensive line more time to get to the quarterback and it disrupts the timing of the routes.  Look at the Seattle Seahawks and the way they play pass defense.  They have been the best defense in the NFL for the last two year.   All their defensive backs jam the receivers when they come off the line.

That requires that defensive back has to move both his feet in order to stay in front of the receiver so that he can jam him with his hands and delay his release.  Seattle does a great job of teaching this to their corners.  When I talked to Byron Maxwell the first thing he said which let me know that this guy knows what he’s doing is, “You jam with your feet”.

Somebody who doesn’t know much about football, wouldn’t know what he is talking about.  What he meant was that you have to move both your feet in order to be able to stay in front of and jam the receiver.  If move just one of your feet, you end up opening up a path for him to release.  If you’re not in front of him because you don’t move both your feet, you open up the release path and end up reaching out and grabbing him, which ends with a penalty for holding (illegal use of hands).

It’s the same principle in basketball when you’re playing defense.  You have to move both your feet in order to stay in front of the dribbler.  If you don’t move both your feet, he will go around you easily.  They call it shuffling.  You must shuffle your feet on defense or you can’t stay in front of the dribbler.

Undlin was talking my language yesterday when all the assistant coaches were available for interviews.

“We’re looking for non-impostors,” Undlin said. “The ball is snapped and then they open – I use the term ‘open the gate’ – and then they just let the guy run down the field. We don’t want that. So my job is to get them to believe in themselves and believe in the technique.”

The technique that I learned as a youngster when I played basketball in high school is shuffling your feet.  Infielders do it in baseball when they have get a ground ball that is hit to their right or left.  If you shuffle your feet you stay in front of the ball.  You have to be a good athlete to be able to shuffle your feet quickly.

The Eagles need to have Undlin work with the linebackers to learn the same technique.  At times I see them let receivers release.  You have to move both your feet in order to get a good jam on the tight ends and running backs when they try to release.

Ironically last year in the Super Bowl, one of the Seahawks linebackers had to go outside to cover the Patriots Pro Bowl tight end Rob Gronkowski and he didn’t move both his feet when Gronk came off the line.  He opened up and let Gronk get by him and he caught a touchdown that helped New England beat them. It all started when he failed to move both feet and opened up at the line of scrimmage.