Breakdown Sports

In this post I just want to diagram every sack up to the Illinois game (post-Illinois will be covered in Part II). Unfortunately, I don't have Western Illinois film, so two sacks will be missing, so you'll have to live with 11 diagrams. I'm going to keep the descriptions of how these work mostly non-existent for the sake of brevity, outside of a brief primer. I embed video where I can and link to a clip where I can't.

Two different B1G teams ran the exact same zone blitz scheme on Saturday, and both teams successfully got to the QB. The scheme: Over Gut 6. This is a scheme that Monte Kiffin loved to run dating back to his time with the Bucs, and more than a decade and a half later, it’s still working in major college football (it’s probably more accurate to say Tony Dungy loved to run it with the Vikings, but I don’t have proof of that). Let’s first go over how it is run and then show examples of both PSU and Michigan running it successfully.

The Cover 1 defense: probably the first defense you learned, whether you knew you learned it or not, whether it was in youth football or in your backyard. Man vs man. Mono y mono. You vs me. Let’s see who can out athlete who. And of course, then there’s the one person playing center field, looking to pick off any pass with a little too much air or smash anyone who dares come over the middle without fear. Yup, good ol’ fashioned Cover 1. It’s as simple as that, right? Well, actually, yeah, pretty much. Relative to other coverages employed in modern football, Cover 1 is about as intuitive and instinctive as it gets. But, that’s relative to other defenses. That doesn't mean that there isn't technique that is required to be successful to run this defense, there is always more to a coverage than that. The Basics [Green = Man-to-Man Match-up, Yellow = Deep zone, Purple = Short zone, Red = Defensive movement, Blue = Offensive movement] Strengths Weaknesses ...