The Birth of the 3-3-5 Defense
An excerpt from The Essential Smart Football
BY CHRIS BROWN ON JUNE 6, 2012
It was early 2000, and Charlie Strong had a problem. Strong, then in his second season as the defensive coordinator for South Carolina, had gone to Columbia, SC to join head coach Lou Holtz in an attempt to resurrect the school’s moribund program. Unfortunately, instead of resurrecting anything whatsoever, the team finished an abysmal 0-11 in the pair’s first year. Fortunately for Strong, in football, the need for solutions to unique problems often leads to new ideas. In his first year with the Gamecocks, Strong’s defense had little luck defending talented SEC squads solely with traditional defensive alignments. In an effort to combat his superior foes, Strong, whose work at South Carolina and later Florida propelled him to his current role as Louisville’s head coach, went about trying to find a strategy that was novel, adaptable, and, above all else, would actually work. What he came up with was the 3-3-5 or “30 stack†defense — a defense still in vogue around college football, and one that stood as an important predecessor to the NFL’s use of versatile and athletic “hybrid†defenders who have become increasingly valuable despite not being built for traditional roles.
The 3-3-5 defense starts with three down linemen, three true linebackers stacked behind those linemen, and five defensive backs. Those five include three in the traditional mold and two hybrid strong safeties/outside linebackers that can patrol the flats, blitz, stop the run or even cover receivers or tight ends in man coverage. This is just one of several ways the 3-3-5 contrasted with more traditional defensive sets, like the 4-3 (four down linemen and three linebackers) or 3-4 (three down linemen and three linebackers). The result was that in 2000, with its revamped defense (along with a new shotgun spread offense to go with it), South Carolina went 8-4 — including 5-3 in the SEC — and defeated Ohio State in the Outback Bowl. Although the 3-3-5 seemed like a wholly new strategy, it didn’t just occur to Charlie Strong out of the blue. The scheme was a natural variant from a defense he coached in another venue under Holtz: Bob Davie’s 3-4 defenses at Notre Dame.
