Why Wink Martindale prefers man coverage and blitzing, but isn't married to it

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Michigan football kicks off fall camp on Wednesday and fans are curious to see the differences between new defensive coordinator Wink Martindale and his predecessors.

Of course, Mike Macdonald and Jesse Minter were both Martindale’s proteges with the Baltimore Ravens, and the system installed in Ann Arbor is based on Martindale’s scheme. But there are certainly some differences.

One of the main narratives is that Martindale is more aggressive than Minter or Macdonald, going for broke more often, which can cause some breakdowns. But Martindale insists that it’s all about creativity, finding ways to break the spirit of any given play, but it’s about doing it in a smart fashion.

“We’ll control the narrative of it. Am I an aggressive playcaller? Yes. I’m an aggressive playcaller,” Martindale said. “We’ve won a lot of football games calling games aggressively. OK? When it doesn’t work, that’s when everybody comes down to he’s always blitzing too much. Don’t hear that at all when you win, you hear but how creative you are. Right? So you just don’t listen to any of that. We’ll find that right mix of pressure simulated, all the other stuff. We’ll find the right mix and that’s what training camp’s for.”

On a podcast last month, Martindale bristled at the idea that he was another version of Don Brown, married to the blitz as well as man coverage. Brown’s scheme was exemplary until it wasn’t, and his stodginess led to the defense going from being the best in the nation in 2016 to one of the worst in 2020. Hence the move from Brown to Martindale’s system under Mike Macdonald.

Martindale points to his track record. And though his final year with the Giants didn’t go as planned, he has a resume that suggests he’s a much different defensive coordinator.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s ridiculous, as I see it,” Martindale said. “It’s ridiculous. You have defenses that have ranked No. 1 in the NFL and in the top five three years in a row and then you come into a new system in New York and you go into the playoffs, but what do they want to talk about? They want to talk about last year, the last year, and it’s just the way life is, where we’re at today’s society. And that’s fine with me. I know where I stand. And I stand where I’m excited about starting training camp, and finding out who we’re going to be, because it’s up to all of us.”

Of course, with blitzing, often comes man coverage. Martindale isn’t concerned about players struggling to adjust to man after years of zone and match coverage, because, as he sees it, that’s foundational to good defense.

“There’s no truth to any of that. I mean, that’s all speculation,” Martindale said. “And, to me, understand this: and I’ll say this wherever I’m at, and I’ll say it when I’m retired, OK? Man teams, when you start out teaching the principle of man, which will do on the first practice, can play zone to win games. Zone teams who play nothing but zone can never play man to win the game. Teams that don’t pressure, when they have to pressure, it doesn’t usually look right because they don’t practice it enough. So if you just want a four-man rush and coverage the entire game, when it comes time where you need to win a situational play, if they know that you’re just going to be a four-man rush coverage team, you don’t have a very high success rate.

“Now if they don’t — I’m not saying you can’t play four-man rush and coverage in situations. But I think just building it off of the man principle, one-on-one coverage principle which these kids have been playing ever since they played football with all the 7-on-7s and everything else they’re doing seventh grade on sixth grade on younger than that, they all grow up playing cat coverage. You know what cat coverage is? I got that cat.

“So I think that there’s a lot more things that go into it than just playing man, man, man.”

He continued to say what he likes about running man when possible, is having players who are adept to it — like Will Johnson. As he notes, the goal is partially the defense ruling the day, but also, ‘I like the guys that get drafted.’ And he’s confident that he has a mix between players and scheme that will cause that to be the case.