THE GODFATHER: Syracuse’s new DC pioneered its go-to defensive set
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efore heading to the New Mexico airport in the early 1980s, David Williams and Rocky Long sat down at Ned’s Uptown Bar and Grill for lunch. The pair of college friends quickly began trading ideas back and forth about a better scheme for a prevent defense. Williams, a defensive-minded head coach at Eldorado (New Mexico) High School, watched Long, then an assistant at the University of Wyoming, pull out a napkin. He began drawing up what would become known as a Cover 5 defense, a simple combination of man and zone.
“That’s Rocky,” Williams said.
It was a simple concept, Williams said, nobody wider, nobody deeper. Williams used Long’s quick-sketch defensive formation until he gave up coaching in 2007.
“He loves sitting around and talking about it and getting his turn with the marker and getting to the board,” Williams said.
Long, now 73, later created the 3-3-5 defense after stints in the Canadian Football League, New Mexico and TCU. He made his mark as the calm professor of the revolutionary set, becoming the winningest head coach in New Mexico history. Now, he’s in charge of the 3-3-5 at Syracuse, who has used it for the past three seasons.
Long needed to figure out how to stop opposing offenses in 1986. At the time in the CFL, teams were allowed five receivers running toward a line of scrimmage on a field 15 yards wider than college football’s. As the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach for the British Columbia Lions, Long wanted to counteract these high-powered offenses which constantly had players in motion.
He landed on using tough players who ran fast and were comfortable shooting gaps and sprinting around with quick pre-snap motions. The Lions were always attacking, former defensive back Kevin Konar said.
“We blitzed. Guys were always bringing pressure on the quarterback,” Konar said. “If we gave up a big play, so be it.”
The disruptive defensive scheme helped the Lions to two straight 12-6 seasons. It spawned the eventual defense that Long trademarked and used for the next 35 seasons across five different schools. The time in professional football also shaped Long into a player’s coach.
“He really knew what we were all going through. He respected us, and he knew how hard to push players,” Konar said.
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Jerry Pettibone needed a new defensive coordinator when he became the head coach at Oregon State. Calling connections from his coaching career, Pettibone talked to Reed Johnson, who was on New Mexico’s staff when Long played quarterback.
“I told him what I was looking for and he said, ‘Jerry, you need to get Rocky Long,’” Pettibone recalled. “He said, ‘[Long] is the smartest football coach you’ll ever be around.’”
Johnson also told Pettibone about a particular game when Long received a blow to the head, opening a gash above his eyebrow. Blood gushed down into his eyes and nose as then-head coach Rudy Feldman ran onto the field. When he asked Long if he was okay, Long looked up and said “just give me the next play and point me toward the huddle.”
Rocky Long, the creator of the 3-3-5 defense, is now on Syracuse’s sidelines. Courtesy of SU Athletics
“That’s my kind of guy,” was Pettibone’s first thought, hiring Long soon after. But his first season in 1991 was rocky — the Beavers didn’t win until the last game of the season. After four games, he had seen enough.
“Rocky came up to me and said, ‘coach, the players that we have at Oregon State, we can’t play a normal style defense,’” Pettibone said. “‘We have to play a reckless defense, it’s either going to be feast or famine, but it’s the only kind of defense that will give us a chance.’”
That was when the 3-3-5 was born. They called it the “voodoo” defense. On every play, OSU either rushed 4-plus in a zone or played man-to-man all over the field. They blitzed most plays. After putting up dreadful numbers all year, they held Oregon to three points.
By adapting that scheme and recruiting creatively, Long catapulted the program to new heights. In 1993, the Beavers went 4-7, but had the seventh-best total defense nationally, ranking top 10 in almost every statistical category, Pettibone said. It was just the third time in 20 years the Beavers reached four wins.
Pettibone said Long specialized in recruiting overlooked players that fit his defense. One day, he called Pettibone from a recruiting visit in Honolulu, Hawaii. They had one scholarship left, and Long wanted to use it on a defensive end from Damien Memorial High School who was smaller than any lineman on this year’s Syracuse roster.
Inoke Breckterfield was a 5-foot-11, 225-lb edge rusher with great bend and burst off the line. Pettibone trusted Long, and brought Breckterfield to Oregon State. He won Pac- 10 Defensive Player of the Year in consecutive seasons and is now a defensive line coach at the University of Washington.
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In 1996, Terry Tumey was in charge of recruiting the Central Valley in California and Los Angeles as the defensive line coach at UCLA. Tumey typically found “tweener athletes,” recruits that were too traditionally small for the defensive line, but not quick enough to play as a defensive back.
Tumey’s first meeting with Long, who was defensive coordinator, covered how the Bruins defense were going to overcome their drastic size discrepancy in the Pac-12. Whether it was USC or Washington, teams had monopolized the “behemoths” inside that allowed them to play “smash mouth football.”
Long and Tumey decided that they had to keep their players moving — creating chaos, just as Long did against CFL opponents and in his first defensive coordinator job at Wyoming. Gap cancellations on the move, Tumey said, that played off similar setups to a 4-3 or a 5-2 led to motion prior to the snap, disrupting the offense.
“He constantly made it to where you were the aggressor and you were having fun by attacking,” Tumey said. “It’s basically Rocky’s personality.”
One of the most successful formations Tumey saw under Long with the Bruins was a go Cover 3. The formation epitomized Long’s tenure. The down linemen would line up in their 2- or 3-techniques and slant to the strong side in their gap cancellations.
It ended up being known as over defense, a simple way to keep UCLA’s defenders moving and cause the offense to audible out of a play. The reverse was called away Cover 3 and tasked the defense to slant away from the strong side of the offensive formation. Having all of the front line moving in one direction tended to work, but it left them susceptible to getting beaten on run-pass options, end around plays or reverses.
Long was aware of the holes, and had been since he began coaching. One time on vacation in San Diego, Williams asked Long if he was prone to the trap when rushing the quarterback. Williams said Long looked like he’d been insulted and snapped back.
“When he talks like that, he pierces his lip and goes ‘well try that goddamn trap. Try to trap us,’” Williams said. “He’s got an answer for all the things that can happen against that defense, and he’s very proud of it.”
After three years at UCLA, Long got his first head coaching job at New Mexico. Now-head coach Danny Gonzales was a safety for the Lobos at the time, and Long offered him a graduate assistant role out of school.
From there, Gonzales became the video coordinator for two seasons before Long promoted him to safeties coach. They’ve coached together at New Mexico and San Diego State in all but two seasons since 1999. This year will be the third.
“We’ve been able to be very successful with really good athletes, oftentimes undersized, and you teach them to play as hard as they can, what to do and when to do it. And then you get them to do it a million miles an hour,” Gonzales said. “That formula has led to great success everywhere we’ve been.”
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The whole point of the 3-3-5 was to keep people guessing. They could get into every standard defensive front, Gonzales said, but the offense never knew how they would get there. Defensive backs had to know their role on every play, which shifted from snap-to-snap, while linebackers were expected to be proficient against the run and pass.
New Mexico was not a gap-controlled team because of the distinct size disadvantage at the line. It “canceled” gaps with movement and post-snap reactions, Gonzales said. The goal was to confuse opposing linemen by throwing out different looks and pass rush patterns. And Long knew how to adjust to every opposing offense.
“I mean, he’s got an unbelievable, impeccable memory for that stuff, and it’s almost like he makes the adjustment for the offensive guys before they do,” Gonzales said.
As his defensive coordinator in San Diego State, Gonzales helped Long become the winningest head coach in Mountain West history. They won three conference championships over nine seasons, going 81-38 with nine consecutive bowl game appearances.
“It was partly because we had great players,” Gonzales said. “But you have to put them in position to be successful and Coach Long has had great success at always doing that.”
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Long retired from being the head man with the Aztecs in 2019. He and his wife, Debby, bought a sprawling ranch with horses in Albuquerque. Debby had taken an interest in horses, and the pair were content on spending the next part of their lives in the same place. The moving was over; Long was ready to hang it up.
Then a month later, the itch returned. Long called Gonzales and asked if there was a job on staff for him. “We’ll make one for you,” Gonzales responded.
The announcement of Long’s return provided a “shot in the arm of Albuquerque,” Williams said. Shirts bearing “Rocky’s Back” started circulating through New Mexico.
Long served as the Lobos’ defensive coordinator for three seasons. But he yearned for an opportunity to test the east coast. Specifically, he told Williams he wanted to stymie the top offenses in the ACC.
His process attacking ACC offenses will be similar to what Gonzales has seen the last 20 years. He doesn’t study a lot of data or analyze statistics. Instead, Gonzales said Long has likely watched every Syracuse defensive snap from last season. After that, he would’ve established the best 11 players on this year’s team and figured out how he can put each one in the best position.
Long prepares for each game with a yellow legal pad and a pencil. He draws out every formation multiple times. Every check and every common adjustment is ingrained in his head by game day. Because of that, Gonzales said Long rarely needs to look down at his play sheet during games. He knows what opponents run and how to combat it.
“He is the smartest defensive football coach I have ever been around, and he is so intense that the players feed off of his intensity and that’s how hard they play,” Gonzales said.
Photo courtesy of SU Athletics