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.

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.

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 ...