During spring practices, Kansas football defensive coordinator and assistant head coach Clint Bowen says a few of the primary goals for the defense include becoming more effective tacklers, swarming to the ball and avoiding critical breakdowns.
“The game of football has gotten, the last few years, so open-field, and so tackling has become such a critical component to that,” Bowen explains. “So that’s obviously one of our biggest emphases of the spring, is to learn how to tackle in different situations and be great tacklers.
“Second, with that, is to get our guys to play hard, because when a guy misses a tackle — it’s gonna happen. There’s great guys in this league in open space. It happens,” Bowen says. “Someone else has to be running to the ball to fix it, you know, swarming to the ball with great effort. And we talk about with our guys: you can’t allow the offense something that they didn’t earn.”
The importance of avoiding mental mistakes that lead to costly penalties, Bowen adds, also have been an emphasis.