Breakdown Sports

Cover 2 is often one of the first zone defenses taught in football. This is because it requires minimal movement, allowing defenders to focus on the “zone” aspect of the coverage. Just as important, because of the minimal movement and design of the coverage, it lends naturally to being a great run defense as all eyes are often focused on the backfield. Once seen as the go-to defense in football, it has fallen out of favor in the past few decades with the development of more advanced and complicated vertical passing attacks. However, recently it has seen somewhat of a resurgence with the “trap” concept, and it remains a favorite near the goal line. For completeness, man under will be treated in a different article.

Back in January, Ian Boyd dropped the disrespect alarm on many within the Spartan fan base when he seemed to indicated that the Michigan State run of success may be coming to an end. Review: Has the window closed for Michigan State I don't necessary believe that Boyd was necessary calling the demise of MSU football with his article. Nonetheless, it's understandable for MSU fans, who have been hearing that same, repetitive rallying cry for nearly a decade, to attempt to shoot him down. In the process of doing so though, I believe some pertinent points have been missed. In this post I'll discuss my thoughts on Boyd's article, where I agree with him, and where I'd like to expand on his thoughts.

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.

Like all coverages, coaches have developed adjustments and checks to mitigate some of the weaknesses of a coverage, or to hinder some of the methods offenses use to attack the defense without switching up the coverage entirely. This is done for teams with certain strengths, against certain formations that look to exploit some aspect of coverage, or to take advantage of offensive tendencies in certain situations. These adjustments can be called in the huddle based or they can be checked based on the offensive look or motion pre-snap. In this piece, we’ll go over some of the things Cover 1 defenses do to adjust to offenses. As a primer, here's your standard Cover 1

Originally Posted at Maize n Brew on July 26, 2013 Background In the summer of 2013, Nebraska was coming off of one of their worst seasons in terms of run defense. Their DTs struggled mightily, their DEs weren't enough to counter the problems on the interior. This post discusses some of the basic Pelini defenses, and the adjustments he made when he realized his team struggled to stop the run. While Nebraska's run defense improved over the course of '13, these are still tactics that Pelini will go to in times of need. For what it's worth, an added bit of information is that Pelini prefers to 2-gap his two DTs on the interior. By the time much of the film seen below was taken, it had appeared the Nebraska defensive staff had stopped asking the Nebraska DTs to 2-gap, and instead focus on maintaining a single gap. This simplification of the defense makes it easier for the DTs to do their job, but tends to make the defense as a whole a bit less effective. Introductio...

For how basic much of MSU’s defense is, on third downs when the offense is behind the sticks, the Spartan’s defense is anything but. Much of the focus is on Narduzzi’s blitz package, and often rightfully so. But what I took away from Saturday’s game against Michigan was a very interesting coverage on the back end. In this post we’ll look at how Narduzzi pulled out a very unique Cover 3 look (some have called it an inverted Tampa 2 defense, which it kind of is, but I honestly think it’s closer to a cover 3) and we’ll discuss why this is such an effective context within the scheme that MSU often runs. MSU’s Cover 4 I’ll briefly discuss the Cover 4 just to give a primer of what it looks like. Basically, the cover 4 will look like a flat back. Two safeties will be even about 10 yards off the LOS and will not retreat on the snap. They have responsibility for the #2 receiver, while the CBs on the outside will essentially be playing man coverage on the #1 receivers. Tampa 2 ...