It’s a good thing Kalani Sitake and Jay Hill are longtime friends because the BYU head coach is making a big ask of his friend.
BYU put a marker down on its future money to invest in Hill and what he brings to the program as the Cougars sit on the cusp of shifting from independence.
So, what does Hill bring?
Well, there’s a defensive philosophy.
And there’s his likable personality and reputed effective professionalism.
Sitake needs Hill to be his Archimedes, his Eli Whitney.
Hill’s skills?
There’re plenty. In short, he’s an operator, a doer, a worker, a master teacher and technician.
On that front, there’s Hill’s likability, leadership and recruiting acumen. There’s his tremendous bond with local media and association with high school and junior college coaches. He can sell football. He can talk the talk. He can inspire and recruit.
In a piece by Jeff Hansen on 247Sports.com, a host of in-state high school coaches praised Hill’s recruiting.
“Jay will bring something BYU has been lacking, a trust, understanding and appreciation of the value of the in-state athlete,” former Orem coach Jeremy Hill said. “BYU has been fortunate for kids like Puka (Nacua) and Kingsley (Suamataia) to come back home, but they have let kids like Noah (Sewell) and Apu (Ika) leave the state. (That) shouldn’t ever happen. He has great energy that is infectious to the players he recruits.”
While Ed Lamb had a similar title at BYU as associate head coach, whispering to Sitake and operating as a personnel director, Hill’s role will be similar but his approach to scheme is different, almost the opposite. I’ve always appreciated Lamb, he was an up-front, smart, honest guy. Hill is similar in this way and Sitake will lean on him for his personal acumen.
Then there are Hill’s defensive beliefs.
They go kind of like this: It is all about stuffing the run first. Then you apply QB pressure with four down linemen and use an aggressive man coverage on the backend. The front can mix up looks from the base four-man to confuse a quarterback by showing everything from a three-, four-, five- or six-man front or load the box with even eight or nine before the snap.
You blitz with corners, linebackers and even safeties. The key is to make a QB work hard to know where the pressure is coming from. The hesitation and confusion of the QB is the key.
This defense takes certain traits. It requires discipline. It calls for linemen that are big and fast and can gobble up blocks. It calls for tough, fast linebackers and speedy athletic secondary players. It requires a lot of wins in man-on-man matches from the front to the back end.
It’s a defense Fred Whittingham used with his leaders Tom Holmoe and Kyle Whittingham in the early ’80s at BYU, a scheme Utah has parlayed into the best defense in the Pac-12 that’s been rewarded with back-to-back conference titles. It’s a defense Hill played in and has coached since his playing days at Utah, one he deployed at Weber State to win Big Sky titles.
“I think (the defense) is going to look very similar to what Kalani ran when he was defensive coordinator at the University of Utah and we worked closely together on that,” said Hill, a proponent of the 4-3 alignment. “I think it’s going to look a lot like what we ran at Weber State when I coordinated and it led the league in basically every statistical category.
“There are going to be times that we play coverage, times that we blitz; we’re going to keep quarterbacks on their toes. I promise that we have an idea of what this defense is going to look like.”
This begs the question: if Sitake and former DC Ilaisa Tuiaki knew this defense, why didn’t they implement it seven years ago? Personnel issue? Did Lamb convince both to run something else? Maybe.
Remember how many opponents the past two years simply played keepaway from BYU by holding onto the ball? Stopping the run is the first pillar of defense and that’s where BYU failed in 2021 and 2022. BYU had one of the worst sack totals in the NCAA this year and that lack of pressure allowed the opposing QBs to simply pick targets like a carnival BB gun range.
If Hill can stop that BYU defensive trait, he’ll have earned his shekels.
That’s why this Hill quote from this week appealed to BYU fans: “I will blitz. I will put every guy at the line of scrimmage rather than just sit there and let people pound us.”
And that brings up the second Jay Hill tier of importance: Recruiting.
To run the defense he wants, he’ll need the personnel. That’s what he’s been doing since the first hours he accepted BYU gear. This weekend he met and welcomed a cadre of recruits making a campus visit.
On the other hand, part of that is putting the right people in the position to succeed. BYU needs a lot of work on its recruiting mechanisms, from it website, summer camps and attention to detail to frequency of contact. Hill can help correct that because he knows that game at the grassroots level.
It may be too late to impact local stars like four-star recruits DL Hunter Clegg, DB Smith Snowden and OL Spencer Fano or even Californian TE Walker Lyons, who I’m told has a $500,000 offer in NIL money from a collective associated with Utah.
But those are the type of Latter-day Saint athletes BYU has to impact and sign if the Cougars are to succeed in the Big 12. In this cycle, Sitake has failed to land a number of those prospects who simply didn’t like what he offered. If its high NIL money he needs to compete with, perhaps he can’t right now.
Sitake has a lot of work to do. He’s got to work harder and get more out of his players and recruiting system. This was supposed to be his wheelhouse. He needs to resolve NIL competitive pitches for 4-star LDS prospects.
His culture needs to produce better than seven wins and an 0-for-October like in 2022. He needs to increase his talent and depth for Big 12 play.
Hill might just be the guy to help Sitake further the trek up that hill.
Like I said, it’s a big ask.
