Tennessee football: 5 things to watch for in Vols spring game

4. Are their any changes to the defense under Derrick Ansley?

Derrick Ansley has been a co-defensive coordinator in the past, and he is certainly trained under the Jeremy Pruitt/Nick Saban philosophy of the Alabama Crimson Tide schemes. After all, he worked as a defensive backs coach while Pruitt was there.

As a result, Ansley is almost certainly going to keep the 3-4 in place. Even when he hasn’t worked with Saban, he worked for Mark Stoops with the Kentucky Wildcats and even Sal Sunseri in a previous stint with Tennessee football, back in 2012, when the 3-4 was a disaster. Simply put, though, he’s firmly grounded in that scheme.

The question is if his experience in the NFL this past season with the Oakland Raiders changed any of that. There, he worked for Paul Guenther, who employed a 4-3 based zone defense that is multiple enough to employ the 3-4, which is in many ways the opposite of what Pruitt does. Pruitt will use a 3-4 based man defense multiple enough to employ a 4-3 and a nickel.

Ansley is likely to be in that mold, but you have to wonder if he’s going to mix in some versatility to the unit with his NFL experience. Pay attention to how the defense lines up each time and if they ever abandon jam coverage on the outside.

Vols fans are familiar with Guenther’s zone blitz heavy 4-3 scheme, as John Chavis ran that for years on Rocky Top. What will happen if Ansley mixes that in with Pruitt’s and Saban’s 3-4 philosophy? That’s all worth looking into.