Brett Kollmann, arguably the most informative YouTube analyst the football community has to offer, has just posted his latest collaboration with the Chargers which you can find in the link below titled ‘He Dominated College Football, Now He Comes For The NFL’. This goes some of the way to explaining just how Jesse Minter’s defensive system works:

I have had a draft script saved for months where I was going to attempt to explain this very topic however, I am glad someone with considerably more resources took on the task for me. To re-iterate (or to explain for the TL;DR crowd) what Brett described is that defensive play calling has forever been broken down into several components; the front, the pressure path (or blitz) and the coverage. Now this creates a problem in that the amount of play calls you can learn from this menu of options is limited because the human mind can only remember so much. As a defensive coordinator, the total number of play calls at your disposal are are essentially set at a 1:1 ratio of plays your players can absorb and understand. That is, and always has been, a limiting factor in defensive play calling.

The issue has always been that everything needed to be merged together in one play call, that is everything in one chunk with each word defining an element of what the DC is trying to get you to do. Let’s use an example based on the playbook sheet above;

Base Odd Wide Tight Rhino 8 Rip Sky Scrape

• Base = Personnel – In Saban’s defense that is 3 defensive lineman, 4 linebackers and 4 defensive backs
• Odd Wide = Front – the nose tackle goes heads up in 0-tech and the two defensive ends are in a 5-tech with the two OLBs in a 9-tech in 2-point stances
• Tight = Alignment adjustment – the Sam (Strong side) will be on the tight end side and aligned just outside him
• Rhino = Pressure concept – this is a Buck ‘You’ stunt
• 8 = Coverage call – Cover 8 (What Saban calls Quarter-Quarter-Half)
• Rip = Direction of the field side – Saban calls his defense by passing strength to the field side
• Sky = Coverage rotation – This means the two-high shell shifts into a single-high coverage by rolling the safeties away from the strength at the snap
• Scrape = Off ball blitz style tag – here this is either ‘scrape’: go just behind the end to cut off the backside in a run situation

This is all just the actual play call, these 8 component parts add up to one very rigid answer to what the offense is presenting and it will change based on what formation they are facing and any presnap motions to change the passing or run strength. The hardest part for players to grasp is the gap exchanges based on post snap motion like lineman pulling, then words like force and spill are used but it becomes increasingly complex.

The way most modern professional defenses avoid this is to have a base set of calls which are much shorter than the example with tags to adjust to any motions or challenging personnel groupings but these can spiral out of control quickly across the length of a 17 game season. You can be left with your players having to consider way too much both pre and post snap; yes I am looking at you Brandon Staley.

Now we can’t go forwards without giving credit to the man who actually created this system; Mike Macdonald. The former Baltimore Ravens’ defensive coordinator and current Seattle Seahawks head coach, spent many years curating and fine tuning this defense before finally rolling it out in Ann Arbor back in his lone season as DC in 2021. He came up with a way of separating the three main components of a play call into three co-existing but indepedent ‘modules’.

Jesse Minter learnt this system whilst working with MacDonald at the Baltimore Ravens and he has really mastered the language and teaching of it. There are differences between their systems and he has also added another feature which we will get into later. So he is not simply a follower of Macdonald’s scheme. The scheme’s origins are traced back to Wink Martindale, they both learnt the system under Don Brown who was a strong proponent of not only the scheme but the mentality it cultivated. There are differences in all four systems, Minter’s is unique and has added some fun new ways to get the most out of the syste, but to be honest the actual structure of the scheme isn’t what makes this defense hard to play against. It is just how incredibly varied it is whilst simultaneously being easy for the defense to master.

Now that we have established the origins of where this system came from we should talk about what is actually is that makes it different. As Brett Kollmann illustrates, the play call is broken down into modules but those modules aren’t independent and have a relationship between them that means the call is much simpler to communicate and understand.

Modularity

My full time career is as an architectural designer with a specialism in modular construction techniques so to say I am a fan of a modular approach to anything would be an understatement. People often misidentify the concept of modularity as taking something you want to build and assembling it using smaller components. The real beauty of it is that those smaller parts can be used with any of the other parts to create a different design without having to start from scratch each time. That is the idea that Macdonald and Minter are bringing into the world of football; you can make it so that instead of learning hundreds of plays, you only have to learn (roughly) 8 fronts, 24 pressures and 10 coverages.

For example, the defense could have 10 ways to run a simulated pressure with one player blitzing from the strong side and the weak end dropping into coverage. Each of those pressures is siloed together. Hypothetically, those types of simulated pressures could be named after NBA teams, so if players hear an NBA team name, they know what pressure they are running. The first letter of the name could be where it’s coming from, and from there, they can figure out everyone else’s job. For example, “Suns” can tell the defense that the safety is blitzing from the strong side, while the end from the weak side is dropping. The defense can run “Suns” from multiple fronts without teaching an entirely new blitz.

From Ted Nyugen’s article on The Athletic

Nail Nickel Jet Mode

The above play is an example that Mike Macdonald used in a seminar about his philoshopy, it’s likely fake from start to finish but it gives good insight into how the full call gets assembled. In the presentation he made to other coaches he described it as a slot machine and once he said that, it immediately made sense to me. Any symbol from module 1 can be paired with any symbol from module 2 and those can be paired with any symbol in module 3. The part that I think is very clever is that each module changes the subsequent one this takes it from a shorter version of a long play call in one dimension into something that is three dimensional in complexity but still compact enough to be digestible.

Now theory is one thing but the real test was always going to be seeing how the players grasped it because at the end of the day that is the base reason for its creation. It has become wildly popular with the players and teams with coaching tree descendents of Macdonald were hired at a rapid rate to be the new wave defensive coordinators of teams in need of change.

“He’s doing a unique job. … I’ve kind of never experienced it,” Ravens cornerback Marlon Humphrey said at minicamp during Macdonald’s first season as defensive coordinator. “He’s really having everybody understand the whole philosophy of mainly just the group of coverages, as opposed to: ‘You got this call. How do you play this call?’ He’s kind of saying, grouping these calls all together, like, ‘What is the whole idea of this call?’ So I think he’s done a really good job of kind of really helping us all be smarter, to where I know what the D-line’s doing. I also know what the linebacker is doing. I also know what the safety’s doing — because ‘The reason why I call this defense is because of this.’”

From Ted Nyugen’s article on The Athletic

As a coach the idea that a cornerback would know the role of a defensive lineman sounds like the stuff of fairytales but in Minter’s system, where everything is technically a zone that you could end up stepping into, it is reality. The fact that the players seem very comfortable with it with speaks to both the design of the system and the coaching acumen it takes to effectively teach this. It takes years in the same season for players to understand what the coach is actually trying to achieve with a particular play concept, it seems the coaches from the Macdonald tree are able to teach that at the same time as installing the play call.

It’s not just words either, the proof is all over the tape. Preseason All-22 film is usually full to the brim with vanilla play calling and shoddy scheme execution but this year’s Charger games were a genuine joy to watch for those who study defense. The players were on point for the most part with only a few schematic errors. The communication was clear and effective even when adjusting to late formations changes and motions. In fact most of this communication wasn’t needed, you can see them all adjust in synchronization as they all know how the changing offensive look affects their role in the defense.

The example play above shows how the Bolts clearly had a blitz call set up with off ball linebacker (#43) lined up outside the edge defender (#98) but when the motion brings the tight end in-line, they swap their ‘pressure zones’ and the safety on that side of the field (#22) steps down as he has to replace the ‘passing zone’ vacated by the personnel swap. This is all without a hand signal or any obvious sign of communication; the result of a ball spiked into the terf is all due to the confusion this quick exchange created.

What makes the clear communication so impressive is that Minter displayed a wide stretching set of play calls at his players across the three games and they executed them very well indeed. I don’t have exact metrics to fall back on but when you’re in the red category across the board in Cody Alexander’s blitz and stunt rates graphics, you are most certainly putting a lot onto your players.

I think my favourite part of this is is that by making the first module, the attacking concept, the dictating factor on every single down, it turns our Bolts into a downhill attacking team. That first word changes everything else after it, whereas in traditional play calling it is usually the last word. The Fangio/Staley system of stopping the offense beating you so badly has been replaced by one that takes the fight to them. Our defense are now the aggressors and it feels so good to finally be supporting a team that will be proudly kicking doors down in the pursuit of greatness.

I will go into how Minter’s defense all works on a different day (I still have a lot of learning to do before then) but I think as an overall philosophy and a teaching system it is obvious why the Chargers made Jesse Minter their new defensive coordinator and until the league figures it all out, it is going to cause chaos for opposing teams.