cover two zone

Whatever you do, #44, it is wrong.

Iowa runs a base Cover 2 defense, and Michigan has been adding lots of Cover 2 to their Cover 1/Cover 3 base. Meanwhile Iowa’s offensive coordinator, Greg Davis, is well known for favoring a simple, West Coast-style passing offense that creates easy reads and, at the very least, open receivers underneath to dump it to.

All of that means it’s a good week to discuss a defensive concept we haven’t gone over in so long that the quarterback’s targets last time were Roy Roundtree and Martavious Odoms: a High-Low read.

If you’re a football guy already you can almost certainly tune this one out. If you’re not, this is a really easy thing to see on the field that can make you sound knowledgeable when you point it out to your friends.

High-Low Defined

This is an offensive passing concept that gives the quarterback two routes that cross above and below a defender’s zone, close enough to stay in view but vertically spaced enough (12-15 yards) that the flat defender can’t cover either by splitting the difference. The quarterback then throws whichever route the high-low’d defender covered.

I say “flat defender” instead of “cornerback” because it’s not always a CB who has that zone.

[After THE JUMP: lots of ways to stretch a man’s zone.]

A lot of top FBS coaches made it there by being experts or even the originators of a concept. Iowa didn’t invent Cover 2, but Ferentz’s teams have run it for so long that his players have instinctualized most of its nuances, and his coaches know the fastest route to teaching it. Rich Rodriguez built the zone read option into the spread ’n shred offense. He can run it against anyone because he knows a million ways to tweak it to deal with whatever defenses try to do to stop it. Same with the pattern-matching variant of cover 3 that Saban and Belichick created for the Browns. Rocky Long is going to run a 3-3-5, or run his 3-3-5 stuff out of different looks. Bud Foster is going to hit you with quarters all day. Tracy Claeys is going to play man.

Michigan’s next opponent is one of those guys. Lovie Smith built a good NFL coaching career by running the Tampa 2 defense, and Illinois is currently experiencing the growing pains of that conversion. Smith’s defensive coordinator is Hardy Nickerson Sr., who imported his eponymous son from Cal to play the crucial middle linebacker role—that is not going well. Last week against Rutgers they blew up the depth chart, sitting longtime starters at all levels for freshmen redshirted and not. When you decide what you want the rest of your life to be, you want the rest of your life to start right away, no matter how long Taylor Barton has started for you (or Brian’s Draftageddon team).

This baby version gives us football laymen an interesting opportunity to see Smith’s scheme in Rodriguez 2008 mode, when the skeleton of the thing is there and untainted by all the things its practitioners will learn to do to make it good. So once you see the concept, it should be uniquely easy this Saturday to pick it up on the field.

[Hit THE JUMP to watch it run so badly you can see exactly why it’s run]

When neither option is actually an option. https://t.co/Kn7DnuAWyP

— Gordon McGuinness (@PFF_Gordon) November 22, 2015

The spread-'n-shred was a defensive coordinator's worst nightmare. At BEST a well-run spread offense can be beaten if you can match up talent on talent. Overnight it made obsolete so many long-developed defensive tools that coordinators could use to take advantage of the defense's numeric advantage in the running game. It also took a game that was mostly played between the tackles and moved the action to the edges. Remember those unblockable wide defensive ends who could blast into OTs then come hellfire for quarterbacks? Now imagine having that guy spend most of the game shuffling, unblocked, waiting for the quarterback to do whatever the end didn't. I'm no defensive coordinator, but I'm pretty sure that bugged them. What makes Don Brown a spread's worst nightmare, is he finds ways to get that back.

A few weeks before the season James Light retweeted the above blitz from ND-Boston College last year. It went viral because of course it did. Light also found the All-22 of it:

All-22 Clip of the same play. Coach Brown had a great gameplan that night versus Notre Dame. pic.twitter.com/CBtEAdaJPa

— James Light (@JamesALight) August 23, 2016

Let's draw it up!

[After THE JUMP: it's a TRAP. No, a RUN trap! No, Kizer, don't trust it!!!!]