LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Mark Ivey likes aggressive football.
This should surprise no one who has ever met Mark Ivey.
He is not difficult to locate at a Louisville football practice. Follow the noise. Or the energy. Or find the group of defensive players being coached by a man who appears to have begun his morning with three cups of coffee and a personal insult.
For years, Ivey has been one of Louisville football's leading suppliers of adrenaline. Now Jeff Brohm has handed him the defensive play sheet.
If it seems like a combustible combination, just remember: Ivey knows unfettered access to the blitz button has its limits.
"You can’t just be a lunatic and unload the gun all day long," Ivey said Monday, "because eventually somebody is going to scheme you on that."
Ivey has been promoted to co-defensive coordinator and play caller, replacing Ron English, which means his responsibility no longer ends with making sure the people directly in front of him create havoc.
Now he’s in charge of the havoc.
"I’d like to be aggressive, no doubt," Ivey said. "I don’t want to sit back and let anybody pick us apart, but I also want to be wise about how we do it. Picking and choosing when and where."
Nobody needs to teach Ivey how to coach with urgency. Ask his players.
Tyler Thompson, the North Carolina transfer, said Ivey’s practices are intense, fast-paced and demanding. That’s exactly what Thompson wanted, in part because he believes something has been missing from his own game.
"A sense of urgency is something that is important in football, and I feel like that’s something I may have been lacking within myself in the past," Thompson said. "I think Ivey has done and is doing a great job of implementing that into me and who I am."
Jerod Smith, the Kentucky transfer, offered a visual scouting report.
"I’m more like here most of the time," Smith said, holding his hand at chest level, "and Coach Ivey’s always here," raising his hand above his head.
Ivey doesn’t dispute any of it. The intensity is intentional. So is the consistency. To his way of thinking, he can’t demand that players arrive with energy every day and then occasionally excuse himself from the requirement.
"I can’t walk out there one day and just say, ‘Hey, sorry guys, I had a bad day. I wasn’t feeling like it,’" he said.
That personality should make Louisville’s defense entertaining. The personnel might make it dangerous.
Brohm has spent the first week of preseason camp trying not to sound too excited about his defensive front. Ivey isn’t making any grand declarations, either. But he isn’t complaining about his options.
His players aren’t shy about their collective ambitions. Clev Lubin says his goal for the defense is that it "be the reason we win games."
"I think the record here is 50 sacks, if I’m not mistaken," Thompson said Monday. "We want to do bigger things than that."
On paper, the depth jumps off the page.
"It’s like saying you’re having too much fun or too much money," Ivey said. "I mean, there’s never too much depth, but I do think we’ve got some good depth."
Louisville intends to test at least one of those theories. Especially on the edges.
Lubin is back after an All-ACC season, and AJ Green (four sacks, six tackles for loss last season) is back, too. Thompson was eighth in the ACC with seven sacks at North Carolina last season. Smith finished last season well at Kentucky with 27 tackles, including five for loss, and a career-high seven tackles with his first career forced fumble in the season finale at Louisville. Micah Carter is entering his third season in the program and believes he’s made an "extreme jump." Then there’s Eric Hazzard, a redshirt freshman who is earning more reps.
"We shouldn’t ever be in a situation where one guy has to play 60 snaps," Smith said. "I think it’s going to be huge when you get to Week 8, Week 9 and guys are really starting to get banged up, and you can rely on six different dudes to be able to play on Saturday."
For Ivey, all those bodies provide possibilities. And maybe temptation.
Send pressure and an edge player may get a one-on-one matchup. Bring somebody from the secondary and create confusion. Keep rotating defensive linemen and, ideally, keep them fresh enough that the pass rush Louisville has in November still resembles the one it had in September.
Ivey likes all of that.
"We’ve got some secondary guys that want to get in the mix," he said. "They want to be in the backfield, make some things happen, no doubt. But you’ve got to be smart about it."
Which is where Ivey’s new job becomes considerably different from his old one.
When he coached only the defensive line, he could watch the offensive line. Study protections. Find weaknesses. Figure out how his guys could attack them. His time coaching linebackers widened that view, to the players in front of and behind your guys.
Now it has to become even more panoramic.
"You’ve got to look at the whole thing now," Ivey said. "Not just what helps us up front, but what helps us from the front all the way to the back end and gives us the best chance."
He says he hopes to call the plays from the sideline, which is where he wants to be.
He'll call them for a veteran defensive front with speed behind it and enough edge rushers to send them in waves. For a coach whose players describe him with some combination of "intense," "aggressive," "fast" and "high energy," that's about as much firepower as one play caller could ask for.
The temptation will be obvious. Attack.
Ivey has spent a coaching career teaching players to play fast, hit hard and get into the backfield. Nobody at Louisville needs to teach him how to turn up the aggression.
His new challenge will be knowing when to turn it down.
Or, as Louisville’s new defensive play caller put it himself, deciding exactly how much of a lunatic the occasion requires.
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