Last week we looked at keys and tip-offs in a general sense. Now, let’s look at keys in the very specific context of Bud Foster’s Bear front at Virginia Tech. We’re going to focus on “peak-Bear” in 2014, when the scheme was new and causing lots of early-season headaches for opposing offenses. Fortunately, we know a lot about Foster’s thinking with the Bear front thanks to X and O Labs, which came on campus to interview Foster and watch the Hokies’ operations several years ago.
The Bear front was implemented to handle QB runs. Putting five guys on the LOS helped eliminate double-teams and stressed backside blockers on pull schemes. One of the trade-offs was that it locked-in a big chunk of the defense into a static alignment, which made the scheme tougher to tweak and easier to predict.