The double-team kills your defensive line before the snap.
You know the picture. Power one way, counter the other. Either way, the playside guard’s hands are coming for your tackle, the center is climbing through him, and a body is chipping off to your linebacker. The tackle is a speed bump. By the time he figures out which way the play went, the back is already five yards downhill.
Coach Jimmy Fuentes at Albany doesn’t let it get there. His DL is multiple, undersized, and attacking. The base is 4-2-5 Cover 3, but the install lives in the two-step slant. It’s a technique that takes the double-team off before it happens, and it holds up with a 160-pound tackle on the field.
Video: Jimmy Fuentes on the Two-Step Slant and Attacking DL Fundamentals
Multiple for the Offense, Simple for Your Kids
Coach Fuentes opens with the philosophy. The days of sitting in one front and one coverage are over. The offense can’t be allowed to know where the front will be and what coverage is behind it.
So Albany is multiple by design. The base is 4-2-5 Cover 3. The shifts are 5-2, 4-3, 3-3 stack, and overload fronts. The line games run on top of all of it.
The trick is who pays the price for the complexity.
“Make it difficult for the offense, but keep it very simple, very, very simple for our kids.”
The way Coach Fuentes runs it, the kid lines up at a different spot from snap to snap, but the technique and the job stay almost the same. Maybe a different read here and there. The offensive coordinator and the OL coach see a new picture every play. The defensive lineman sees the same rep.
That’s the install Coach Fuentes is selling. The multiplicity is on paper. The technique is the same rep every time.
Nose-to-Nose Tackles: Don’t Tell the Offense Where You’re Going
Albany’s tackles never play in a 3-technique. Never in a 1.
Always nose-to-nose.
The reason is the slant. If the tackle sets up in a shade, he’s already telling the offensive line which way he’s attacking. The guard knows. The tackle knows. The center knows. The play is built around the leverage, and the defense gave it away pre-snap.
Head up takes the tell out. The OL has no idea which direction the slant is coming. The tackle keeps both gaps live until the snap. The same nose-to-nose stance can produce a slant strong, a slant weak, or a stand-up read on the same call.
Coach Fuentes walks through the stance in the clip and explains why he doesn’t deviate from it even with bigger bodies. The reasoning ties back to the next teaching point.
Slant as a Technique, Not a Stunt
Most coaches hear the word slant and think stunt.
Get across the face. Run upfield. Blow something up. Hope you run into a back.
That’s not what Coach Fuentes is teaching.
The slant at Albany is a technique. It’s a gap attack with half-a-man rules.
A one-technique on the slant doesn’t try to cross the guard’s face and free-run. He attacks the guard through the slant-side armpit, gets half-a-man across, and fights the gap from that leverage. The aiming point is the next offensive lineman, not open field behind the OL.
The “why” sits in what the offense actually runs. Coach Fuentes lays it out flat. Most defenses see power and counter all day. On power one way, the playside guard is coming to double the tackle with the center and chip off to the linebacker. The traditional read-and-react tackle gets caved down. All the leverage is the offense’s.
The slant takes the space away before any of that happens. The tackle attacks the half-man and is already in the gap by the time the guard tries to put hands on him. The double-team can’t form. The chip to the linebacker doesn’t get clean. The play breaks down at the line.
Coach Fuentes walks the rep on the dummy in the clip and shows where the head ends up, where the hands end up, and what the leverage looks like at the finish.
The Two-Step Rule: Win With Your First Two Steps
The mechanics are tight. Two steps. That’s the standard.
The piece that gets coached the hardest is the first step.
It’s not a wide step. It’s not a step that lets the tackle gain ground laterally before he attacks. Coach Fuentes shows the wrong rep in the clip first, the one where the first step pops out and the offensive lineman’s hands get on the numbers before the slant ever started.
The right first step pulls the numbers down and away from the guard.
Down. Away. That’s the cue. The chest gets off the guard’s plane so the guard’s hands can’t latch. The shoulders are already turned toward the next offensive lineman. Step two squares the leverage in the gap and the fight starts from half-a-man with the body in the right posture.
Then the rule for what comes after.
If you feel pressure, keep fighting it.
The slant isn’t a one-and-done. If the guard recovers and the double tries to re-form on the second level, the tackle keeps the half-man fight live and works through it. The gap is the gap. The leverage was won on step two. The third and fourth step is the finish.
Coach Fuentes runs the rep on the dummy in the video and gives the cue he uses to know when a tackle has the first step right. The cue is the part of the install most DL coaches will want to lift word-for-word.
The attacking front isn’t about athletes. Albany doesn’t have them every year. The starting tackle Coach Fuentes is breaking in this season is six foot, 160 pounds. The install holds anyway because the technique is built for an undersized body fighting bigger ones. Nose-to-nose stance hides the call. The two-step slant takes the double-team off before it forms. And the half-a-man fight wins the gap with leverage instead of mass.
This article is the slant install. The full Drills for an Attacking Multiple Defensive Line clinic from Coach Fuentes builds the rest of the front around it.
He walks through the redirect counter for the wash and double situations the slant doesn’t beat, the high-motor finish rules, the multiple-front menu that lets one technique scale across 5-2, 4-3, 3-3 stack, and overload looks, and the line games that turn the front into a path-of-least-resistance problem for any OL coach on your schedule.
The drill progressions that coach the feet, the hands, and the eyes for every front are in there too. If you want a DL room that stops the run with technique instead of size, the full clinic is the install.
Link: Jimmy Fuentes – Drills for an Attacking Multiple Defensive Line
