Football analyst Chris Brown published an article on smartfootball.com last Tuesday about Alabama head coach Nick Saban and his defensive backs – specifically, that they aren’t taught to backpedal.
“I never backpedaled at Alabama,” former Alabama cornerback Dre Kirkpatrick told NFL.com this summer.
Brown, who wrote “The Essential Smart Football” and contributes football analytics pieces to websites like ESPN.com’s Grantland, was intrigued by Kirkpatrick’s quote and decided to examine his claims further.
“Some fairly questioned whether this was hyperbole – How do you not teach defensive backs to backpedal?” Brown wrote. “But this is something Saban very specifically has chosen not to do.”
Brown told an anecdote from Saban’s coaching time with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns and talks about how Saban adapted to fit the skill set of a slower cornerback he coached, Everson Walls. To counter his lack of speed, Saban developed a new strategy.
“Saban began teaching his now-famous ‘shuffle’ technique, rather than the traditional backpedal,” Brown wrote. “Essentially, it is a three-step shuffle technique, at which point the defensive back may break on a short route or can turn and run and play the receiver down the field.”
Alabama’s defensive backs are often in press coverage and play closer to the line, a strategy more adept to the quick shuffle rather than a backpedal.
But does Saban still use that technique today? He was asked about this during Monday’s news conference.
“They’re taught to backpedal. They all can backpedal,” he said. “You come to practice every day, they backpedal in individual, they backpedal sometimes on their plan. We play our corners up on people a lot, so sometimes they bail-off; sometimes they play bump-and-run. Sometimes they get off and backpedal.
“I just think that we’re just not philosophically in to playing a lot of soft coverage, where you line seven, eight or nine yards off a guy and give him a lot of easy throws in front; but we do teach them how to backpedal. We teach them how to plant and drive out of a backpedal. There are coverages that we have where our corners do play off, that’s just not philosophically how we play most of the time.”
Safety HaHa Clinton-Dix was asked a similar question about what Kirkpatrick said and whether he was taught to backpedal. His answer seemed to confirm what Saban said – that the defensive backs do learn to backpedal, but Saban plays his defenders closer to the line than most teams, so they don’t have as much room to do so.
“I have no take on that – what went on with Dre Kirkpatrick in Cincinnati. I really don’t know anything about that,” Clinton-Dix said. “We do backpedal in practice, so I don’t know exactly where that came from.”
As for whether Saban himself was taught to backpedal as a cornerback at Kent State?
“And I can backpedal,” he joked. “I backpedaled when I played, and I can still backpedal – and cover – somebody.”
