After I saw your post here, I tried to find that in Club Level but was not able to. Can you give me a clue where to look?
Tim Bowens was never in a 3-4 defense. He was certainly of the build and play-style that would work well as a Nose Tackle, and Saban wanted him that first year, but he could never come back from his injury.
Yeah, I got no idea what he did under Shula, but under Jimmy Johnson I imagine he was a typical 1-technique in that Miami 4-3 scheme, and in Jim Bates defense he was basically like a "true" Nose Tackle, but playing over a Guard instead of a Center, and paired with another guy doing the same. I wonder if alen1 knows more about this, but apparently the Jim Bates DTs didn't actually have 2-gap responsibility, which was kind of a shocker to me.
Bates insists he used 1 gap principles but he played a lot of things. I think he was big on gap control and it ended up being a heavy technique by the DT & NT at times while other times straight up 2 gap, which really ends up being 2 gap IMO.
DTs in Bates' system looked like they were two-gapping. But they were really just responsible for 1-gap and all they did was plug it. I believe the LBs had 2-gap responsibility though. That defense has always seemed really weird to me.
I think the philosophy behind Bates defense was really good but the horses needed are hard to acquire, which is why he had issues.
I don't think it was all that hard. Miami consistently fielded some very solid defensive lines from 2000-2003. We'd find a Bowens, Ogunleye, Armstrong, Jay Williams, Haley etc very often. The LBs weren't that difficult either. The WLB/SLB were nothing special, while the MLE had to cover a large part of the field. The CBs though had to play a heck of a lot of man coverage.
I think its difficult, personally. Had to find guys who could bring pressure off the edge and a MIKE that had to cover a lot of ground and had to deal with the Guards. It became man, it was really matchup-zone aka pattern reading.
