Auburn coordinator Kevin Steele is one of the longest-tenured defensive play callers in the SEC.
Entering his third year on The Plains, Steele has turned around a unit that was routinely in the bottom half of the conference into a top-10 defense nationally.
“I’m tied for the longest tenure as a defensive coordinator at the same school in this league and I’ve been here two years,” Steele said. “Second lieutenants in Vietnam had a longer life expectancy. So there’s lot of change in college football nowadays. Anytime you can keep continuity as much as you can, the same system, it sure helps them be better players.”
Steele said the defense is making strides with their energy and leadership, and progressing as a unit in his press conference Thursday night. The Tigers forced five turnovers in the first spring scrimmage and the defensive line dominated in the trenches, allowing almost no big gains on the ground.
Steele expects the defensive line to be even better than last year’s group with the amount of players he has returning.
“The fact that we put different combinations of guys out there and the play did not drop, we didn’t get things exposed because we had different guys out there in different combinations, that was a positive,” Steele said. “Probably the biggest thing is they self-corrected because they understand the system, whereas the first year, wow! I mean, you’re out there trying to get them lined up. The second year the younger guys, occasionally, there’s a weird formation but they applied the principles and the concepts. And it makes it a whole lot easier.”
Steele has been mixing lineups whenever he can in scrimmages to show the players there is no depth chart yet. He doesn’t want the players concerned with what the rotation will be and where they stand in the depth chart; he is simply focused on each player working hard to get better.
“There’s not game planning,” Steele said. “It’s not result-orientated. It’s process-orientated that they understand the process and the components as well as the skill set for their position and mastering that. We create some stress now on purpose because we aren’t game planning.
"There’s no scoreboard. We make some calls sometimes to put stress on them. You wouldn’t call that in a game if you knew what they were in, but I know what they are in because it’s spring, so put stress on them. Make them play themselves out of some hard situations."
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