How Tony White and the 3-3-5 defense ended up at Nebraska with Matt Rhule
LINCOLN, Neb. — In the weeks after the 1996 football season, Rocky Long, the defensive coordinator at UCLA, headed out to recruit in El Paso, Texas. He heard about Tony White, a savvy linebacker, from the coach at a rival high school.
Hired at UCLA one year earlier to implement his distinctive defensive system, Long found a fit in White. The coach invited the prospect to visit Los Angeles. White signed with the Bruins and played as a true freshman, then he started for three seasons, completing his eligibility in 2000.
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He stayed at UCLA in 2001 to finish academically and met a defensive assistant who’d arrived from Buffalo — 27-year-old Matt Rhule.
White and Rhule, separated by four years in age, committed intently to their work, said Bob Toledo, the UCLA coach. Time-consuming hobbies were not a concern.
“There were no golf clubs in his trunk when I hired him,” Toledo said of Rhule.
White liked to double down on film study and help with analysis of recruits in his spare time.
Rhule, who came with a recommendation from his college coach, Joe Paterno, stayed for one season and headed back east to Western Carolina. White left in 2002 and competed in the Canadian Football League for three years before he jumped into coaching, a journey that actually began during his playing career for the Bruins.
They would meet again.
The road that brought White, 43, to Nebraska from Syracuse last week as defensive coordinator was plotted on a New Mexico practice field in 1980. But the paving of that road began in 2001, when a chance crossing of paths — among many that connected White and the Huskers to the 3-3-5 defense — set in motion events that led to the most high-profile hire on Rhule’s first coaching staff in Lincoln.
Leading the Blackshirts defense ☠️@CoachMattRhule has named Tony White our Defensive Coordinator.#GBR
— Nebraska Football (@HuskerFBNation) December 9, 2022
The 3-3-5 defense was born out of necessity.
Joe Lee Dunn served his first head coaching stint at New Mexico from 1983 to 1986, preceded by three seasons as an assistant coach in Albuquerque. At the start of it, his time overlapped with Long, a former New Mexico quarterback who coached the secondary for the Lobos.
Long went from Wyoming to Canada to TCU during the ’80s.
He kept tabs on Dunn, though. In 1991, Memphis, with Dunn as its DC, upset USC to open the season, using a series of new defensive looks that confounded the Trojans. Dunn cooked it up, often bringing linebackers to the line of scrimmage and attacking from angles that defied convention.
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So when Long’s defense at Oregon State allowed 40 or more points five times and the Beavers finished 1-10 in that same season, he went looking for a new scheme and called Dunn.
Dunn provided the framework. His system was built to create havoc. Long adapted it to the Pac-10. The 3-3-5 — 3-3 Stack or 30 Stack as it’s sometimes known — made sense, because Oregon State struggled to recruit big, strong defensive linemen.
It needed an edge.
“You show multiple looks out of this concept that you can’t in a normal 4-2 or 4-3,” Long said. “With three down linemen and five guys wandering around, including the safeties, who can be added to the front at any time in a bunch of ways, it really comes down to which players you have.”
In October 1994, four weeks after Nebraska crushed UCLA and sent the Bruins into a tailspin that wrecked their season, Oregon State waltzed into the Rose Bowl and beat coach Terry Donahue’s team 23-14.
The Beavers, mired in a streak of 28 consecutive losing seasons, did nothing overwhelmingly well. But they played a feverish brand of defense. Toledo, then in his first season as the UCLA offensive coordinator, took note.
Two years later, when Donahue resigned to work in TV, Toledo took over. His first call went to Long, the Oregon State defensive coordinator whose scheme had aggravated the Bruins.
Long’s scheme worked well against the run, and he found that it placed unusual pressure on the QB.
“You’re always going downhill and attacking people,” said Toledo, the former UCLA coach. “They’re coming at you from every angle. You never know what to expect. It just gives guys a chance to be active and enjoy playing defense. They’re moving around all the time, and they’re blitzing and they’re getting after you.
“Kids like that. Defensive coaches like it. Offensive coordinators don’t.”
UCLA jumped from five wins in 1996, the first year after Toledo hired Long, to 10 wins in 1997.
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Long recruited his adopted home state of New Mexico and a corner of West Texas that included El Paso. Defenders like White allowed for the quick turnaround.
The Bruins won 20 consecutive games in White’s first two years on campus. They had a shot at the 1998 national title into December.
“He was a real leader, like a coach on the field,” Toledo said of White. “I knew that he knew football. He was really into studying it as a player.”
Long left the Bruins after two seasons to take over at his alma mater, New Mexico. Phil Snow arrived as DC from Arizona State in 2001. He connected, too, with Rhule, and later Snow coordinated defenses for Rhule at Temple, Baylor and with the Carolina Panthers.
In 2006, with Rhule on his ascent as an assistant at Temple and Long nearing the end of an 11-year run at New Mexico, White got into coaching. He spent one season at St. Genevieve High School in L.A. before he caught on with Karl Dorrell at UCLA as a graduate assistant.
A year later, Long hired White at age 29 to coach the New Mexico linebackers. Among his first set of players was senior Zach Arnett, another student of the game — and of Long’s defense.
Over the next decade, San Diego State turned into the 3-3-5 epicenter. Long coordinated the defense in 2009 and 2010 for Brady Hoke, then Long took over as head coach. White coached cornerbacks for nine years and served as recruiting coordinator from 2011 to 2017. Toledo came out of retirement in 2013 and 2014 to run the offense.
Arnett followed as a graduate assistant from New Mexico and worked his way to defensive coordinator when White left with Danny Gonzales for Arizona State in 2018.
At San Diego State, White grew into an elite recruiter, according to Long.
“I thought he had a unique sense for seeing talent,” Long said. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever been around at understanding who was a player and who wasn’t.”
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Four times in Long’s final five years in charge of the Aztecs, they ranked among the top 10 nationally in yards allowed per rushing attempt.
After the 2016 season, in which SDSU allowed 3.08 yards per rush, fifth out of 128 FBS teams, Dino Babers, just hired at Syracuse, ventured out to San Diego to study the defense.
He was smitten with it.
So was another rising head coach, Matt Rhule.
Rhule moved from Temple to Baylor after the 2016 season, and his defensive coordinator, Snow, switched from a 4-3 base to the 3-3-5. By 2019, Baylor, in winning 11 games, led the Big 12 in yards allowed per passing attempt, per rushing attempt and in scoring defense.
Before the 2020 season, Babers’ Syracuse defense needed a makeover. He hired Arnett, the former New Mexico linebacker who remained at San Diego State. But Arnett left for a better offer from Mississippi State after 10 days.
Enter White. And just like that, Syracuse and Mississippi State were both running the 3-3-5.
Against the run, Syracuse improved from 4.56 yards per attempt (82nd nationally) in 2020 to 3.45 (17th) in 2021 and 3.83 (42nd) in 2022. Mississippi State, over that same time under Arnett, came in at 3.55 (24th), 3.63 (28th) and 4.12 (68th).
Nebraska has not allowed fewer than 4.16 yards per carry in any of the past seven seasons.
How will this defense work in the run-heavy Big Ten?
“It allows you to be really versatile, show a lot of moves and put players in position to make plays,” White told Syracuse.com in 2020.
But as at Oregon State 30 years ago or today at Mississippi State, the central principle of the system is not about the number of defenders who play at the line of scrimmage. It’s about maximizing the talent on a roster.
“You’ve got to be able to go back and say, ‘Who are your best 11 football players?’” White said in the same interview two years ago.
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With depth at the line positions, the scheme resembles a 4-2-5. If loaded at linebacker, it could look like a 3-4.
The Huskers will aim for the kind of improvement that TCU showed this season in its first year of 3-3-5 play under DC Joe Gillespie. The Horned Frogs, headed to a College Football Playoff semifinal against Michigan, cut their scoring defense by nearly 10 points per game over last season. They’ve allowed 4.10 yards per rush (66th nationally), down from 5.79 in 2021 — an average that ranked 123rd in the FBS.
White was paid $711,420 in 2020 at Syracuse, according to tax records. A private university, Syracuse does not release salary information, but White is believed to have received bumps in pay over the past two seasons to keep him at the ACC school.
He and new Nebraska offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield are likely to rate as the first $1 million assistant coaches in school history in 2023. White told Syracuse.com that his reconnection with Rhule happened fast this month.
Salary information on the new assistants will be released by Nebraska when their contracts are completed. On-field positions to coach linebackers, wide receivers and quarterbacks remain to be filled.
From afar, Toledo, in charge at UCLA when Rhule and White met, said he’ll be watching the Huskers.
“I’m happy for them, and I’m proud of them,” he said.
Toledo, 76, is retired a second time in Southern California. Dunn, the originator of 3-3-5, died at age 75 last year.
Long, 72, runs the defense for Gonzales — his former San Diego State assistant and a White contemporary — back at New Mexico.
Long watches all of the third-generation purveyors of the 3-3-5. Arnett took over as interim coach at Mississippi State this week in the wake of Mike Leach’s critical health issue.
White is on the ground in Lincoln, already recruiting to his defensive scheme.
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“I’m sure I’ll be watching Nebraska film a lot closer than I ever have,” Long said. “Tony’s a smart guy, and Tony’s going to be doing some things that have me going, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”
(Photo: Michael Allio / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
