Breakdown Sports

A lot of Spartan fans were excited about the play of RS FR Vayante Copeland last season, despite playing in less than two games due to injury. I had a chance to go back and reassess his brief play, and honestly, was more impressed than my initial reaction. While there are areas where he needs to improve, he did show a lot of natural ability. In this post, I'm going to review Copeland's film and give my impressions of where to expect him to play going forward.

At its most basic, Cover 4 plays as a four deep, three under defense; and at its most aggressive, it plays almost identically to a tight Cover 0. To the average fan, Cover 4 may sound like a passive, prevent-type defense, while to the more nuanced fan, it may seem like an aggressive coverage that can bring 9 defenders into the box. The truth is that it is all those things and more. One of the greatest powers of the Cover 4 is its ability to adjust, the intricacies, and tweaks that can be made to the same look to both confuse the offense, and remain fundamentally sound. In this article, we’re going to look at the basic elements of coverage in a Cover 4 defense.

Over at the PAC 12 Website, Rich Neuheisal had a very cool segment with regards to how Oregon found and exploited a flaw in MSU's scheme. Take a look:

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 ...

For the most part Michigan played pretty solid in coverage against MSU, but also had some significant busts that lead to big gains for the Spartans. There have been some questions about a few of the ways that Michigan has worked in coverage, and I'll briefly discuss how Michigan plays man coverage to help clear that up as well. At the end of the day, what you see from this exercise though, is that you can be very good most of the day, but if just a few mistakes get exploited, the opposing team can put up points. Man Coverage People have been wondering about if Michigan is doing this right. Namely, the common complaint is not turning back and looking for the ball. In man coverage, once you flip your hips, you have two basic techniques you will play: in-phase (in-sync, in-step, in-line, even) and trail. In-phase means that you have your hip on the front side of their hip and your shoulder on the front side of their shoulder, and you're using your body to gradually defl...

If you followed along Saturday, you know I had some issues with the way Wisconsin's cornerbacks were playing. Much of it is being young, but there are things that you need to learn or else you'll eventually die by fire, which was the case Saturday. It's not they aren't good enough athletes; it's that their technique is still raw and they aren't doing the little things to help themselves out. Let's take a look. The short stuff Wisconsin played a lot of Over 4 and mixed in some Cover 3 against Ohio State. That's fine. Cover 4 is a great defense against the spread that allows the safeties to get involved in run support. Seriously, it's not a passive defense , but the Badgers didn't necessarily run it like some other teams do. That's fine, too. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. But it does tend to put a tall task on your outside linebackers, who have to defend against the run and also cover the entire hook/curl/flat...