“Well, they have to. Their edges have to play great. I think that, I look at guys like, well Aidan, obviously, but Jenkins, Morris, Ojabo — I think that they’ve gotta play with great edges against this zone team. Because when you play with great edges or hard edges, what you do is you don’t allow them to get the lateral movement in your defense that’s required in the zone scheme and the run game to be very effective. So that’s a major part of it. Because what happens if you don’t have the hard edge, and that defense starts to move laterally, all it takes is one little crease and Walker is very good with his vision and his explosiveness. He’ll find that crease and create success in the run game. They’ve gotta create the hard edge and allow the linebackers to play in a tighter area than what they would normally have against that style of team. I do think they’ll be fairly successful at that.

“I don’t think that the game plan last year against Michigan is something you can implore this year because the coverage is just so different — the structure is just so different. Last year, I always say like — last year, Michigan had one tool in the tool chest and it was really, really good against lesser opponents, and that’s why they were always so high statistically in defensive metrics: total defense and scoring defense and so on and so forth is that nobody else had as good of players as Michigan. So, they were able to dominate. Now, what they’ve done is, they’ve changed the structure of defense and it doesn’t allow them to dominate to the point that they did last year or years previous under Don Brown, but it also creates more tools in the tool chest when you do face teams that have similar athletes or are starting to adjust. They didn’t have any way to adjust prior. So, once it started to go bad, it went really bad.

“Now, it’s different. While they give up more yardage here or there statistically speaking, they’ve got answers. And what you’re doing to try to attack them, they can combat that. So I don’t think that Michigan State can come out and be like, ‘Hey, we can replicate last year’s game plan or one thing is going to allow us to have success vs. another.’ They’re gonna have to attack them in all areas. Payton Thorne is going to have to be able to run the football — that’s what gave them some troubles against Rutgers. Rutgers was running the quarterback in that stretch zone read scheme, gave them some fits in the second half. Now, having said that, the defense made critical plays in that game in order to win the game. The problem was on the offensive side they couldn’t move the ball. So, from my seat, this defense may be not as dominant against lesser opponents, at least has the ability to adjust themselves in order to start having success once they get beat.

“Now, you might say: what happened against Nebraska? Nebraska had to use what I would call unique and creative play calls and concepts in order to beat individuals who didn’t use their keys. That’s what happened in those touchdowns. They got misaligned in one of the touchdowns inside the five, and then everything else was eye discipline. There was a totally illegal formation that they got a touchdown off of — blatantly illegal formation — and then the others were non-discipline with the eyes from the defensive backs.

“Long-winded answer to say that I think Michigan’s defense is more suited to go through this stretch late in the season than they were a year ago. But whether that comes to fruition or not, I’m not sure. Because Michigan State can create explosives.”