Lions Smother McLeod, Yale Running Game

Mike McLeod is the most dominant skill position player in the Ivy League this year. He broke his own school record for touchdowns in a season by adding three against Columbia, and with three games left and another season to go, his career stats will only become more phenomenal. Yale’s running attack was completely smothered in the first half of play Saturday, however, with McLeod averaging just 3.5 yards per carry on 23 takes. McLeod attributed the lackluster half to having to wake up super early in the morning.

“It’s always difficult playing Columbia, being that we have to wake up and take the bus down here—kind of like a high school team—the day of the game,” he said. “That’s something we had to play through.”

Another reason McLeod was so ineffective early on was that Columbia—a team that has never shown on tape that it could stop the run—did everything right on defense that was lacking in the first half of the season. The Lions forced Yale into situations where they had to run, and when the Light Blue defense knew what was coming, they were the faster, harder-hitting unit on the field.

Schematically, the only difference in Saturday’s game was that Phil Mitchell was moved from defensive end to nose tackle. Defensive coordinator Lou Ferrari clearly made the best use of Mitchell’s talent by moving him to an interior spot, where Mitchell led the Lions with 13 tackles. Columbia lined up with four down linemen and had a constant rotation of interior defensive players, but this has been the team’s typical approach to run-heavy opponents.

Yale head coach Jack Siedlecki said that the Bulldogs missed too many opportunities in the passing game and committed too many turnovers, putting Columbia in situations where they clearly knew that a run was coming.

“We knew with the speed of [Columbia’s] game, that we’d have to get used to that early,” he said. “But the biggest thing was the turnovers, and then when we came out and threw the football, we had four pass plays in a row, wide open, that we missed. So now you let them come down with the safeties to play the run.”

Columbia sophomore spur Andy Shalbrack, who had five tackles and an interception, said that the defense had prepared for an offense with a relatively conservative game plan, and that’s exactly what the Lions faced in the first half.

“I just think it was one of those things where they only run a couple plays,” he said.
“They haven’t really needed to run a whole bunch else, so we knew what they were going to run at us, and we knew how to stop it. It was about getting the intensity up, and we did that for a half, but then, thirty minutes ... that was the game.”

McLeod didn’t look as impressive as Penn’s Joe Sandberg or Fordham’s Xavier Martin, both of whom put up more than McLeod’s 135 yards against the Lions. Yale’s offensive line wasn’t creating a forward surge at the line of scrimmage, and Columbia was reading plays so well that a swarm of defenders was waiting for McLeod as soon as he found a seam. He was always a few steps shy of finding space to generate speed.

It wasn’t a difference in McLeod’s play that caused Yale to pull ahead in the second half. Columbia’s defense was on the field almost twice as long as the offense, and as the weather cleared up, Yale had more freedom to mix in passing and running plays to keep an exhausted Columbia squad guessing. They relied on third-string tailback Jordan Farrell and quarterback Matt Polhemus to divide the running duties. McLeod did seem to become more aggressive when the Elis were in the red zone, as two of his touchdowns found him twisting through a horde of defenders before dramatically slamming the football into the end zone.

Yale broke the game open in the last 30 minutes, but Columbia’s rush defense showed a vast improvement over any game this year. Should Yale continue their undefeated season en route to an Ivy title, Columbia will have shown that when a few breaks go their way, they are capable of hanging with the best offense in the Ivy League.