His unit was on the field, backed up inside the red zone and clinging to a five-point lead with only a handful of ticks left on the clock. But even when LSU quarterback Danny Etling found a wide-open D.J. Chark in the back of the end zone for what looked like the game-winning touchdown, Auburn defensive coordinator Kevin Steele knew it didn’t matter.
“When you've done it a while, with one second, they've got to be lined up, they've got to be set, everything's got to be exact on point,” Steele said. “They were still moving and going around and those things. I really never thought that they got it off. … I was pretty confident they didn’t get it off.”
He was right, and Auburn pulled out a nail-biting win over LSU Saturday night. His defense held the Bayou Bengals to 338 yards, a far cry from the 485 they racked up a year ago, when Steele was the defensive coordinator at LSU.
Saturday, his Auburn defense limited LSU to just four of 13 conversions on third down. The Tigers have held opponents to a paltry 27.87 third-down conversion percentage, good for 18th in the country.
“I think there's two things: I think players have done a good job on the back end conceptually, understanding what we're going to do on third down,” Steele said. “I think Coach McGriff has done a really good job of when we do our third-down presentation and we present to them what we're going to see, I think our guys have really done a good job of understanding the concepts we're playing versus the concepts they're running.”
The defense did a much better job of containing LSU running back Leonard Fournette, who only received four carries in the fourth quarter. He finished with 101 yards on 16 carries, less than half of what he accumulated in 2015.
Stopping him was among the highest priorities for the defense, and bringing down someone who is considered one of, if not the best running back in college football makes a mark in some of their minds.
“I can remember at Under Armour All-American things and he was in the game and I was at the camp or whatever, stuff like that,” said linebacker Darrell Williams. “I've just been seeing him play for a long time and this is my first year getting to play a lot. I've seen him play in college and since I've been here, so I knew he was a good player. You respect his game. It's just good to be able to play against guys with talent like that and playing my best.”
Williams and the other linebackers were forced to play without Tre’ Williams, who was ejected in the second quarter after officials ruled his hit on Etling fell under the criteria for targeting.
Even with the increased likelihood of targeting being called, defenders aren’t taught to alter how they’d normally hit on the off chance they run into a targeting-like situation.
“No, we really don't [think about it,]” Darrell Williams said. “It's just one of those things that's unfortunate sometimes, because that's really just football. If you think about the way you're trying to hit somebody, then it kind of hinders how you play and the physicality, so we don't really think about it.”
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