Nebraska's Four-Down Three-High System vs. Boston College
The Huskers run a hybrid three-high defense and are one of the best units in the country at stopping the run. They held Boston College to under 50 yards rushing in the Pinstripe Bowl.
Recency bias has many fans and pundits believing that Iowa State was the originator of the Odd Stack three-safety system. That’s just not the case. The 3-3-5 and all its varieties can be traced to Joe Lee Dunn, the former head coach of New Mexico and Ole Miss. Dunn is credited with inventing the system in the ‘90s while he was the defensive coordinator at Memphis (State).
Rocky Long, the other godfather of the Odd Stack, began tooling his system in ‘91 as the DC for Oregon State. The system didn’t take off until the late ‘90s, when Long took the job at New Mexico and eventually ended up at San Diego State. Long is probably most famous for his Aztec Stack.
The system flourished at smaller programs that could enlist (and recruit) tweener players who were athletic but may not have carried a lot of size. Long used the Odd Stack structure to attack offenses from every point and the five-DB system to create multiple coverage structures.
While at UCLA, Long recruited a linebacker from Texas named Tony White. White’s good friend, Ed Stansbury, was one of the top quarterbacks in the nation and a UCLA commit. Long was looking for a LB and, with Stansbury's encouragement, flipped White from Oklahoma State to the Bruins.
In 2008, Long’s last year at New Mexico, he hired White as his LB coach. From there, White stayed with Long until 2018, when he joined another Long disciple, Danny Gonzalez (current LB Coach for Arizona), at Arizona State. He finished his time in Tempe as the DC for the 2019 campaign and then went to Syracuse to coach for then-head coach Dino Babers. White will begin a new chapter of his career in Tallahassee next year and will likely take his version of the Long system with him.
After an abysmal first year at Baylor (2017) that saw only one victory, Head Coach Matt Rhule and DC Phil Snow knew they needed to make a change with their defense. For years, the two had successfully implemented an attacking 3-4 system at Temple. The Big 12 was just different. It still took one more year, 2018, for Snow and Rhule to fully embrace the Odd Stack.
At the same time, Iowa State and Texas began to install three-safety systems under Jon Heacock and Todd Orlando. Snow and Rhule knew they needed to keep pace with the conference's high-powered offenses, and the success of the Cyclones and Longhorns allowed them to pivot to an Odd Stack structure.
Rhule would eventually bounce back to the NFL for several years. Snow, of course, went with him. But, when Rhule returned to the college level without Snow in toe, he still wanted to go back to an aggressive Odd Stack, and this is where the story comes full circle.
Rhule contacted Tony White and hired him as his defensive coordinator. In his first season at the helm of the Blackshirts, the defense finished 19th in DFEI (think NFL’s DVOA) even though they went 5-7. In ‘24, the defense finished one place higher at 18th (BCFToys). Next year, White will call plays for Mike Norvell, who is no stranger to White and his defense, having competed against him in the ACC.
