Nickel Back Expected To Provide Boost On Irish Defense In 2016
In his first months on campus as a freshman at Notre Dame, cornerback Shaun Crawford quickly rose the depth chart to become the No. 1 nickel back before suffering a season-ending torn ACL last August.
This spring, Notre Dame is already looking toward the fall with optimism now that Crawford is back on the field.
“More than anything else, the ability to play man coverage in there,” head coach Brian Kelly said. “We like [Crawford’s] ability to play man. Very smart player, instinctive player. I think you have to have a real good sense of the field. Corners play out by the numbers and they’ve got a friend with them called the sideline.
“The guy that plays inside has got to understand the field a lot better, has got to have an instinct to play inside. And he has a natural instinct of playing inside a lot better. A guy that can play inside is a little bit more unique in the sense that he’s got to have really good speed because he’s got to cover guys coming across the field, going vertical and he possesses that speed and instinct.”
Crawford is vying for a starting cornerback spot, but at the very least is expected to handle the nickel back duties. Notre Dame is also comfortable with senior starting cornerback Cole Luke at nickel, Kelly explained Wednesday.
“That’s a priority for us, and we’re working Cole Luke a lot at that position as well,” he said. “We don’t want to be in a position where we feel like we can't even go to our [No.] 2. We feel good about Cole and getting him over. We’re getting him a ton of work at that position as well.
“We want to feel like we’re going to go into the season with two very good nickels and not put ourselves in a position where we can’t take the Sam off the field to get the matchups we need. We felt like at times we were in some unfavorable matchups with the slot receiver on our Sam.”
After Crawford went down, no player truly emerged as the team’s nickel back. On third-down packages, the Irish relied a bit on Devin Butler early in the season with mixed results. For the most part, though, they kept Sam linebacker James Onwualu on the field on passing downs.
Defensive backs coach Todd Lyght praised Crawford’s ability and also expressed confidence in Notre Dame’s improved flexibility with a strong nickel in 2016.
“Shaun is a real football guy,” he said. “He loves the game, he studies the game, he works at it really hard. Obviously he was going to start for us last year at the nickel position, but had the knee injury. He did a great job in the offseason of working to get back and has been doing really, really well as far as these last six practices have gone and we're really happy with his progress.
“He really excels on the inside because of his football intelligence and his understanding of the 2-3 exchanges and the 3-4 exchanges and how we play between zone, prior zone and his blitz coverages, he does a great job in his understanding of that.
“We moved Cole inside, so he’s picking up the nickel position. Cole is one of our smarter players in the back end and he’s doing a great job of moving inside and understanding how we want to do things and where we want him to play and he can be really good for us at inside at the nickel position.”
Notre Dame hopes that everything will click in the third year of defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder’s scheme. The performance at nickel back will have a lot to do with how that story turns out.