What exactly does a Wink Martindale defense look like? PFF analyst weighs in
The Michigan Wolverines are undergoing a bit of a change on the defensive side of the ball with coordinator Don “Wink” Martindale running the show. Despite coming from the same Baltimore Ravens tree that Mike Macdonald and Jesse Minter did, Martindale’s defense is a bit different despite retaining a lot of the core values.
The self-proclaimed “O.G.” of the system that Michigan has run the last few seasons now gets a chance to put his stamp on the Wolverines. Pro Football Focus analyst Steve Palazzolo joined The Wolverine Podcast this week and described what exactly a Martindale defense looks like.
“The first thing is schematically thinking about how Wink Martindale attacks offenses,” Palazzolo said. “He attacks aggressively. He attacks. That’s what he does. Every defensive coordinator in their opening press conference says we’re going to attack, we’re going to be aggressive, but Wink actually backs all that up. He blitzes like crazy.
“The college game is different with the spacing and the wide hash marks. So that’s where I’m most interested to see how aggressive he will be from a blitz perspective. Because that was what he was known for at the NFL level, sending five, sending six, putting a lot of pressure on cornerbacks in man coverage, putting a lot of pressure basically on his entire back seven to be able to cover a lot of space, but try to put that heat on the quarterback, make quick decisions. And force them into some bad decisions along the way.
“So my first reaction was I can’t wait to see what this looks like at the college level because we’ve seen Wink Martindale have a lot of success with the Baltimore Ravens and with the New York Giants. Sometimes things didn’t go so well when he didn’t maybe have the corners to hold up.”
Martindale’s Michigan defense could see more pressures dialed up, putting some more pressure on the secondary to hold up in coverage. Palazzolo says the system he likes to run was created to cause confusion and disruption at all times.
“I think at its best, clearly it’s going to get pressure,” the PFF analyst said. “Because you’re sending five and six at an extraordinary rate. There were games where the Giants would blitz 50-60 percent of the time and just wouldn’t stop. And it was different disguises, but it was mostly five and six-man pressures.
“So at its best, not only are you getting heat on the quarterback, you’re creating a little bit of confusion, a little bit of indecision, but then you have corners on the back end that [have their jobs made more] difficult. When you go back to last year, the Giants didn’t really have the corners to hold up. So they were getting torched by teams like the 49ers who have these incredible receivers. But when you have corners that could play on an island and linebackers who were smart, because a lot of it is communication, a lot of it is being able to handle pass-offs and just making sure that everybody’s covered.
“It’s not just always pure man. So when you have all those pieces in place, if you take away the quarterback’s first or second read, there’s not much time to do anything else. So at its best, it is causing that confusion. And I would say it’s also just increasing variance.”
There also is a bit of bend-but-don’t-break to his scheme, which requires guys to make one-on-one plays that decide football games. A few examples are on film the last few years with the Giants, says Palazzolo.
“When you think about the 2022 Giants, that was a team that made it to the playoffs,” he said. “And a lot of the underlying metrics for the Giants weren’t necessarily all that great. It’s not like they had a star-studded defense. The offense was pretty good, but again, not really star-studded, but they found ways to win and there were these individual games where they made a goal line stop against the Tennessee Titans. They made a fourth-quarter stop against Aaron Rodgers and the Packers where it was a fourth down. That deflection from an unblocked blitzer that ended the game. It’s one of those, if you bat it down, the game’s over. If you don’t, maybe you lose, right? It is that high variance type of defense.
“But again, if you’re coming from a position of strength, recruiting well, and you’ve got good corners and you have good players up front, then you have a lot of success. The other, other thing that stands out to me was Dexter Lawrence and his success in the Giant’s defense as a monster nose tackle, pushing the pocket, and having fewer double teams to deal with. I think about Kenneth Grant and Mason Graham and what they might be able to do.
“Of course, Grant is more of the pure nose tackle type, but their ability to just be one-on-one rushing from the interior because of all the chaos that’s happening behind them, I think it bodes well for what Michigan can do from a defensive line perspective.”
Michigan’s success as a program coincided with its decision to be a little more multiple and versatile in the looks it showed teams defensively. Success on that front earned Macdonald a defensive coordinator gig with the Ravens and now a head coaching job with the Seattle Seahawks. Jesse Minter, who coordinated Michigan’s defenses the last two years, is now Jim Harbaugh’s DC with the Los Angeles Chargers.
The way U-M played the last few seasons has spread across the sport, but what is it the new hotness in today’s NFL? Palazzolo broke it down:
“If you were oversimplifying defense through the years, you would say are you a blitz-heavy defense or are you a rush with four-type of defense?” he asked. “For example, the Giants on their Superbowl runs against the New England Patriots. They were able to get pressure with four. So some schemes simply wanted to do that. And then other schemes said, no, we don’t maybe have the horses. We’re going to blitz. We’re going to get a little crazy and send five or six far more often than everyone else, because we have to get pressure.
“I think the hybrid of that is what we’ve seen with Minter and Macdonald. The hybrid of that is more often than not, they’re going to rush four, but you still might get the benefit of the indecision that you create from the blitz scheme or from crowding the line of scrimmage or the indecision of not knowing where the rush is coming from. It’s almost like these old-school Steelers 3-4 defense where they had three down linemen, two outside backers and they could rush one, drop the other, and those were pure pass rushes, but it created just enough indecision on the offense.
That’s when the zone blitz came into vogue in the nineties, created a little bit of indecision and basically, caused issues with how offenses solve facing five and six-man pressures. So I think that’s why it’s become en vogue, right? I’s not choosing one or the other. Are you going to be blitz-happy? Are you going to trust your front four? You can almost do both and kind of play in the best of both worlds.
“I think that’s the hybrid that, that new scheme has really, has created for the Ravens, for Michigan and now all across the NFL.”
