Shoop did a good job of coaching up his players to jump on loose balls. Other than that, it's hard to tell what his defensive game plan was, because Army made too many unforced mistakes to sustain a drive. I hope UT is counting on Tech to do the same.
I'll tell you exactly what his plan was. He pulled some things off the shelf that work against option and combined them.
One, is 5-2 base. That's how everyone defended wishbone back in the day. The whole trick of the flexbone was to defeat the 5-2 base option defense by breaking the bone and putting the halfbacks in the slot, so we can attack them with four verticals.
Lots of folks try to defend us with a 5 man front, the smartest of which is Bud Foster, who splits a DE very wide and then rushes one of his OLBs (or doesn't) into the gap presnap. This monkeys with the reads. PSU never monkeyed with a read once. Foster's D can also simply not blitz that LB and they're in a 4-3 to defend passing situations. PSU never was.
The other way folks defend us successfully, think UGA and Miami, is a 4-3 with a deep MLB, and the OLBs tight to the line. The OLBs eat up a blocker, the MLB is too deep to get an OL on him before he flows to the edge, and he makes like half the tackles on the day. This can work, but only if your OLBs have enough freedom so they don't get tied up, tangled up, optioned, whatever.
So it looks to me like Shoop figured he'd combine those two approaches. But the result is this giant empty space right behind the line. I mean, it's egregious. Follow the link, and pause it presnap and draw a giant circle in the gap behind the PSU line before the snap. The Gravedigger is going to get 7 yards a carry minimum with that. If we took our basic gameplan from VT last year and ran it against PSU's formation, we'd score 30, maybe more, and probably only need to call maybe four different plays the whole game.
And if Shoop doesn't have a Plan B, and starts trying to draw one up on the sidelines mid-game, holy crap look out. We might see some Bobby Bowden level stuff.
I feel good about this game.
Now all this is no guarantee that Shoop defends us like he did Army. Maybe he didn't spend a lot of time scheming against Army because Army sucked that year. Still basically does. But if if if he rolls this out against us.. ..man.
Watch their defensive alignment the first two drives this fall.