Breakdown Sports

As teams begin to get faster, more spread out, and more pass heavy on offense, a way many defenses are counteracting this is by moving to a 3-4 defense. A 3-4 defense sacrifices some of the beef, at least in terms of numbers, at the LOS in favor of an extra LB (relative to a 4-3). However, not all 3-4 defenses are equal. From a high-level POV, there are two standard types of 3-4 defenses: One-Gap and Two-Gap. Both have different strengths and weaknesses and are generally played differently. In this article, we’re going to focus on the One-Gap 3-4 defense, it’s nomenclature, it’s strengths and weaknesses, the fundamentals of the front, and how it generally plays against a variety of offensive sets.

Originally posted at Bucky's 5th Quarter on Oct 3, 2013 Because Wisconsin has such run game prowess, many of its passing concepts attack the sidelines, away from the box area. In this area, the Badgers will often run "route adjustments" depending on the coverage. These adjustments allow the Wisconsin offense to attack multiple coverages with limited receivers, as other eligible receivers tend to be used to sell the run fake or help out in pass protection. They rely on the quarterback and receiver seeing the same thing, and if they don't, it often leads to bad things. In this post, I'm going to try to piece together where these issues were made and talk about why you have these adjustments within your offense.

Northwestern threw a lot of cover 4 at Nebraska in an effort to get bodies down into the run game. One thing that Cover 4 allows is for the LBs to flow a bit more freely and quickly to the initial look, because the safety takes care of backside cutbacks . What we saw in the Nebraska vs Northwestern game was Northwestern initially having success bottling up Nebraska because of this. The safety crashing down from depth allows him to defend either the QB keep or the RB cutting back across the grain. Later on, however, we saw Nebraska adjust some of their play calls to take advantage of this scheme. In this post, we’ll look at just that.

I had the opportunity to go on Unsportsmanlike Conduct again today. Here's a link to the podcast. LINK Perma-Link

Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images Northwestern D: 4-2 Nickel Over Cover 4 Nebraska O: 11 and 10 personnel. Nebraska D: Mostly Cover 4 and Cover 1, 4-2 Nickel Northwestern O: 11 and 10 personnel, mostly outside zone

Photo by David Banks/Getty Images Wisconsin D: 3-4 One gap or 2-4 Nickel; Mostly Cover 1 or Cover 4 Also, check out the PODCAST on the same topic.

I had the opportunity to do a Podcast with Rich over at BuckAround, and we chose to look at an update of Wisconsin's 3-4 One-Gap Defense. So go ahead and listen to Wisconsin and Michigan accent clash as we get in-depth with the Wisconsin defense. LINK In the meantime, I should have a coaching points post for the Wisconsin defense touching on much the same topics tomorrow, so be on the look out for that.