Transcription
Hey, welcome into this Joel Cloud Show YouTube exclusive. We've been teasing this for months. It's football schematics. The series is here, Understanding Football with Joel Clad. All the terms that you hear on weekends, analysts like myself, we throw out all these terms. Cover one, cover two, what does that mean? Well, I'm about to explain it to you. Let's talk about defensive passing coverages today. I'm going to go over cover one, cover two, cover three, and cover four, kind of the basic ones, and give you a tutorial of what they are.
Now, here's what I want to do with each coverage. I want to explain what each coverage is, how you get into each coverage, and how it works, plus why you would run that coverage if you're a defense. And I'll give you an example of each play, uh, on video as well, from some of the college teams that run these schemes, uh, during the course of the year.
[Music] Let's get into it. Let's start with cover one. Okay, so the first thing you have to understand is what is cover one? Cover one is a man defense. That means it's man-to-man, and it's cover one because there is one safety in the middle of the field, deep middle of the field. There he is. It's cover one. Now, you can run other variations of man defense like cover zero. It means there's no safety, but this, for simplicity purposes, is the easiest way to understand man defense. Let's start with cover one, and cover one is the safety in the middle of the field. So you've got to identify that first. Then it's about how do you get aligned. Okay, the first thing that a defense is going to try to see when the offense comes up to the line of scrimmage is where is the run strength? That means where is the tight end? Because the tight end is a bigger body, almost like an offensive lineman. So you've got to put your bigger bodies on that side, your linebacker versus your safety. So the run strength for the defense is where the tight end goes. So you've got to identif- identify where that is. The tight end here is on the right side of the offense. That means the run strength for the defense is going to be on their left. That would just mean, in turn, that the passing strength, where the wide receivers are going. And this personnel group right here with three wide receivers, the passing strength goes with the two wide receivers out wide versus a tight end and a wide receiver on the right side. On the left side, the offense has passing strength. So the passing strength here lies with the slot. Now, why does that matter? Well, that's because that's going to position your linebacker and your safety because they have to defend a player. It's man defense, so now you've got to align them on the proper side. In this case, right here, the linebacker is going to go with the run strength because he's a bigger body, so he's going to go with the tight end, while the safety, who's more of a coverage player, maybe a smaller body, is going to go with the wide receiver. So now that we've gotten aligned, now it's just how does this coverage work? And it's pretty self-explanatory. The number one receiver to each side is going to get taken by the corner. So each corner is going to be on those wide receivers in man-to-man defense. Then on each side of the coverage, now that we've got the safety and the linebacker aligned, those two players are going to take the number two player to that side. That means that this safety has the slot in man-to-man, and this linebacker has the tight end. There's only one more player left on the offense that can go out for a passing route, eligible, which is this running back right here. This running back is going to be covered in tandem by the two linebackers based on where he releases. Okay, some call it a B-J-O technique between these linebackers, but basically, this is what you have to know. If this linebacker gets a release out of the back from that side of the offense, then he has them. And if this back goes on this side of the offense, then we're going to put a different sh- and that backer has them. So they're reading the side at which that back is going to release, and they each are going to have man-to-man responsibilities on that back in the backfield. It's pretty easy, it's pretty self-explanatory. A lot of times, I would just draw it like this. You got the dotted line from this linebacker and the dotted line for that linebacker. So let's review just a second here. What do we have? Well, the first thing you have is a middle field safety, and then you've got man-to-man techniques based on where the passing and running strength is on the offense. You can see that they're head up. They're on low technique. Low technique meaning they're jammed. They're they're jammed right in the face of these wide receivers. It makes it tough to throw short routes. So why would you do this if you're a defense? Well, there's a couple of different reasons, but namely, the first is that if you look and you count the players in the box, and the box meaning this run box, meaning around the offensive line, what you have is you have more players in this box than the offense can block. So your run strength is very good. You're going to call this if this team is is a a run-oriented team, this is a team that wants to run the football, and you've got to get an extra player down there that they can't block. You've got seven, they've got six to block. You've got run ratios, one more player than they can block if they want to run the football. So that's why cover one would be really good in one respect. You also run this coverage if you feel like your athletes on the outside are better than their wide receivers because you're going to take away the short throws, and this quarterback is not going to have anywhere to throw, and they're going to be tight window throws, meaning the defense is going to be right on the wide receiver. So everything about it is stressful for the offense. It's tough to run the ball, it's tough to throw the ball, as long as you've got better athletes on the outside. That's one of the reasons why you would run this defense. You can also have the ability to blitz in the interior because again, you have both of these linebackers in the middle of the field. They each had one player, which means you could blitz one of them, and the other one could be in man. That creates more of a rush. There's just so many different things you can do out of cover one, but that's kind of the primary case of why you would run it. You want to get an extra hat in the box, extra player in the box in order to stop the run. You feel like you've got great athletes on the outside, you can stop their short passing game. Those are all great reasons. Ohio State ran a lot of man coverage. Let's me give you a quick example against Michigan, them running man coverage out wide on the left side. You can see the man technique, and what did I start with? The safety. You've got a single safety up top, he's middle of the field. Now you've got these players on the outside, whether it's passing or running strength, they're going to follow those guys out. They're in tight techniques, they're in man-to-man, head up, right in front of those wide receivers, and they're going to follow them wherever they go on the field. So as Michigan runs this play, they're going to run just kind of a little slant out to the outside, and you can see this materialize. Linebacker follows the running back back, they're in man-to-man on the outside. Now, Michigan completes it, but again, it's a tight window throw, and it's more difficult on the offense. There's just more pressure on the offense overall. That's cover one. Now let's move to cover [Music] two.
So now we're in cover two. And so what is it? How do we get into it? How does it work? Why would you do it as a defense? And then an example. Okay, so the first thing is, what is it? Cover two is a zone defense. So this is very different than cover one. Cover two is a zone defense. Why do we call it cover two? Because there are two safeties now high on this field, right here and right here. They are responsible for half of the field each of them. Okay, so again, these two safeties are responsible for half of the field. So when you look at it as a quarterback, you'd kind of look at it like this. Those deep halves are responsible by those players, and they are in zone defense. Zone meaning they're responsible for this area, and as soon as a wide receiver or a passing threat gets into that zone, they would try to latch on to that player and cover that area. That's the two deep halves, those two safeties. A coaching point would be wider than the widest, deeper than the deepest. Nobody gets behind them. Big soft zone defense. Now, underneath that, what you're going to have is five zones underneath the two halves. You're going to have zones kind of cut up like this, where you've got one right over the ball, and then you've got the others out wide. And you can see that you've got five players left. So you've got a corner here, he is in what's called the flat. That's a flat. This corner is also in the flat. Now, these linebackers are going to drop into their zones right here. You've got what this is called the hook curl. This is called the hook. This is called the hook curl. And again, on the outside, you have the flat. Generally speaking, these defenders just understand that like the middle linebacker has the middle zone, the outside linebacker has this outside zone, the corner has all the way outside into the flat. But those are the zones that you're looking at in cover two. Each safety has half the field. These five underneath players have the five zones underneath. Now, the coaching points for how these guys get into their zones and what they're responsible for is a little different, okay? Because man-to-man is easy. Cover one, you line up, you've got the passing strength, you've got the running strength, boom, you've got your man, you follow him around the field. This is a little bit different. Now, you also have to identify where your strength is. So remember from the last one, you've got a tight end right here, so the run strength is going to be to the right. But it's different because now you don't have a safe down. So when you've got two safeties back up high, what you're going to have to do is walk out a linebacker towards this slot player, all right? As you walk that linebacker out, this is what happens to your defense. Your run box loses a player. So now the offensive line plus the tight end, they have enough bodies to block all the bodies in your run front. So this defense, cover two, this passing defense is actually not great against a running team. That's going to be a problem. Now, we'll get to that in just a little bit. As far as we go from alignment perspective, that's how you get that linebacker out, kind of over the slot, about halfway in between the offensive tackle and the slot wide receiver. Okay, so I told you that the safeties are going to be wider than the widest and deeper than the deepest. What do the corners do? They can't just float out to their zones. No. And here's why. These corners can't just float out to their zones because the biggest area on the field that is, I would say, attackable, are these intermediate to deep seams. Okay, so if you can get routes straight to those seams quickly, then all of a sudden you can overwhelm the defense with too many deep routes for the deep defenders. So the critical part of cover two, the most critical part, is this. These corners right here have to jam these wide receivers. That means get your hands on the wide receivers, boom, like that. If they let them just run freely right down the field, then they're going to be in those seams, and we can attack as an offense in those deep seams. So the biggest key of the whole defense from from a passing perspective is that the corners get their hands in what's called a jam technique, okay? So they're going to let them go deep eventually, but they've got to get their hands on them and slow them down so that the pass rush can show up, so that these safeties can get in better position. Because the quicker that these releases can get down the field and into those vertical seams, now this passing defense is going to have a real hard time. Now, if we, if we just go back like cover two, why would you use this, Joel? You just said like, well, geez, like there's some, there's some threats, you can run the football really well, you can get those deep seams. Yeah, but here's the thing. If you've got great defensive tackles that can stop the run, and this team can't run the ball on this run box that is light, what you have is a very safe defense where you've got these two players back like this, you've got jam players here, you've got three players here in zone, and all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to move the football. You can't get explosive plays. They can rally up, they force the offense to snap the ball 8, 9, 10, 11 times down the field rather than giving up a big play for a touchdown. So it's a very safe defense, a very safe defense. And it's a defense, quite honestly, that if your corners do a great job jamming the outside wide receivers, it can be difficult to throw the ball on because you've got deep players. Another reason why you would run this is if there's a great wide receiver for the other team, like let's say it's Ohio State with Jeremiah Smith, and the opposite team, they would say, like, well, we're, we're never going to just allow a corner to be one-on-one with Jeremiah Smith. We want help over the top with that safety. Okay, so that's how you get help over the top, and then you get jam at the line of scrimmage, and then now this wide receiver, you know, he's basically double-teamed. So that's another reason why you would run cover two. The biggest point of weakness, I think, is the ability to potentially stop the run or not or not stop the run. So if I think of a team like Michigan that has two great defensive tackles, if they can stop the run with just those guys, six guys up front, now this coverage becomes much more feasible, much more feasible. Let's take a look at an example here, uh, from this season of cover two. And this is going to be Penn State running cover two against Ohio State. And Ohio State saw a lot of cover two, by the way, why? Because they've got great wide receivers, because they wanted to keep opposing teams, they wanted to keep safeties on top of those wide receivers, deeper than the deepest, wider than the widest. So what do we see here? You see those two safeties back in the middle of the field. They're not going to give it away right away, but if you're Will Howard, you can kind of see like, okay, I've got two safeties out there, and they're deep, and I've got corners that are up in the face of my wide receivers. Well, that's cover two. I've got jam corners, and I've got two high safeties. Now we can run the football potentially if we wanted to, or we can try to throw the football. And on this play, you know, Ohio State, you can see as they snap the football, watch those two safeties. Look at them, they bail out of there. And then there's that jam corner. He's in the flat responsibility. So he got his hands on the wide receiver on the outside, and then he was sitting waiting for that inside route to get to him because he's responsible for a zone. So that's cover one, and then now cover two. Remember, it's a zone defense. Those half players up top, very important. The corners, very important. Zone coverage, cover [Music] two.
All right, so we've seen cover one, we've seen cover two. Now let's go into cover three. What is it? Well, it's a zone defense. All right, and cover two has two deep zones. Cover three has three deep zones. As we take a look at it, it's going to look a lot like cover one first and foremost. You're going to have one middle safety in the middle of the field, there he is, right there. And you're going to have corners, and they can be up bumped on the, you know, jam close to the wide receiver, or they can be off. But what you have to understand is is that we're going to divide the field into three deep zones. The corner has one, the other corner has the other, and this safety has the third. So there are the three deep zones. We've got on that side, in the middle, and right there. There are my zones, and the corner and the safeties have that responsibility. So it's pretty self-explanatory here. Once you understand cover two, you kind of understand cover three. Now, it's just three deep zones, and you understand the different players that are responsible for those areas. Now, one thing that you also have to understand is that you're getting into the formation, how it works. Very similar to cover one, even cover two, you've got to identify the run strength. The tight end is over here on the offense's right, so that means that the linebacker is going to go to that side. The wide receiver, which is the passing strength, goes over to the left. So the safety is going to go to that side. Now, he's going to be down. You see? So now this safety is no longer in a deep position like he was in cover two. He's in a down position because it's cover three. Why would you do this? Well, this is a way to be in really strong run defense without having to play man coverage. If cover one was great run defense because you've got an extra hat or an extra player in the run box, the same can be said right here for cover three. So now when I draw the run box, what do I have? I've got seven defenders, and there's only six blockers in front of them. So I am in a very strong position when it comes to defending the run. But I might not have corners that I ultimately trust to play man coverage against the wide receivers. So what do I need to do? I need to put them in zone, so they're going to sit back and play off into a deep third. Now you understand kind of why you would try to do that. And then all of these players in pass defense are also going to be playing a zone. They're going to have to spread out a little bit because you've got now three deep zones and you've got four underneath zones. The weakness of this coverage is going to be the flats. The flat, meaning the outside portion of the field. That's the area of the field that you can attack if you're a wide receiver, if you're a quarterback, because it's going to be very difficult to run the football against this loaded run box. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take advantage of the fact that this corner has deep responsibility, and I'm going to run things like hitches and outs, and I can throw this all day long. That's what's called free access. Anytime that the outside defender, like this corner, has a deep responsibility, that means that I've got free access underneath him. Access meaning I can throw it underneath him, I can make sure that I'm running a hitch or an out, and he's got to back up because he's got deep responsibility. There's no reason that that corner would want to jump up here and try to take a chance because he's got no help behind him. It's a lot different than even man defense when he's going to be in a bump technique and really be trying to be aggressive. He's in a soft zone technique. So I can take advantage of that. Now, cover three is very valuable for the teams that don't feel like they can stop the run with two high safeties. They need this extra player in the run box like this so that we can get the seventh defender in their stopping the run, and they want to try to be safe behind it where they're not giving up big plays and they're not allowing these corners to be on an island in man defense against a wide receiver that maybe they think is a little bit better. That's basically it. Cover three is pretty simple, and that's the way you would try to attack it. You would also try to attack it trying to get like run right up the seams of the defense like this because again, this middle field safety, he'd just be sitting right there in the middle. You'd try to maybe run those seams up there. But I, we'll tell you this, it's mostly a run defense, and you can see that at play when we're watching some of this video as well. If you're a team like Michigan and you're facing this Texas team, you can look and immediately what do you see? A middle safety, and yet the two corners both inside of the numbers, they're well off. So they're not in a man technique, but they're in a zone technique. And you can see the difference. They're not sitting there lined up right in the face of the wide receiver. They've got kind of open shoulders, just a little bit. Single safety, the open shoulder corners, they've got deep responsibility. This is cover three all day long. Uh, Texas played really well in this game, and for the most part, Michigan played a ton of this cover three. And what do they throw? A short route on the outside again. Free access stuff. That's what you would try to be throwing if you're an offense right there. Free access meaning the outside player has deep responsibility, you can throw it underneath him, generally speaking, all day long. So that's cover three. Looks a lot like cover one, but with zone principles. Now let's move to what I think is the most unique of these four coverages, cover four, or [Music] quarters.
Cover four is a lot of times called quarters, and quarters coverage is because in theory, you could have four deep zones. So this is a zone coverage. However, it's played with man principles. So it's really both. Like, for instance, as a quarterback, if I see quarters coverage, I immediately think to myself, man, and I'll show you why in just a, just a moment. The first thing you have to understand is that every one of the secondary players could potentially have deep responsibility. So that's how you get into four, cover four, quarters, each responsible for a quarter of the field. Now, how they get to that is where we get these man principles again. Very unique, and a coverage that's hard to run, but you're going to see why it's so effective here in just a second. The first thing you have to know is that the corners are basically in man. All right, they are reading this outside player, and I'm just going to draw them in kind of a man technique like this because these corners effectively speaking are playing man against the number one wide receiver to their side. The safeties are now doing something very different than they were in cover one, two, or three. Very different. They're in what's called a pattern read. Let me explain what I'm talking about. A pattern read means that these safeties are going to be pattern reading the number two release. So who are the two number two releases? Well, the tight end is the number two release or potential release on this right side of the offense, and this slot player, he's the number two release over there on the left side of the offense. Which means that this safety, he's got eyes on that tight end or the number two. This safety has eyes on that slot player, he's the number two. So what does a pattern read actually mean? That means that if this wide receiver ends up running a horizontal route, either inside or outside, or goes to block that backer, this safety inserts himself into the run front. He sits. He doesn't go deep into his quarters. He sits. I'm going to erase this route real quickly, and I'm going to get into the next possible outcome. This wide receiver runs a vertical route. Now, this safety is going to grab on to number two and defend him as basically a man player. He would sit with him on what's called like a basic or a hook route, or if he runs right down the middle of the field, now the safety will carry with him deep and he will be defending a quarter of the field. So again, it's, it's a very different technique. It's a very special technique. It's called a pattern read. So we've got pattern reads on number two from these two safeties. We have got man-to-man on the outside, like cover two. The weakness of the structure, it seems, is the run box. The offensive line and tight end have enough players to block all of our players defending the run because we've got a linebacker who's got to walk out over this slot player. It looks like my safeties are deep. However, however, this is one of the strongest run defenses you can possibly call. And the reason is is because these safeties can become run defenders based on what the number two release does on each side. Let me show you how that works in practice here. I'm going to clear this. Let's say that this tight end, he's just going to block right there because we're going to try to run some sort of zone play or some sort of action in the backfield, and the tight end's going to block. Well, what does my safety do right here? He comes directly down and becomes a run defender. In this case, let's say that this slot receiver is just running in, he's trying to block this linebacker. This safety is down. Now, let's draw that run box back. How many players do I have in the run box now? I've got plenty. I've got six, four defensive linemen, two linebackers, and two more safeties. So I've got eight players defending the run. So this is a, a, a coverage that you call if you want to be a heavy run defense coverage. Now, there's obvious weaknesses. One is you're in man-to-man coverage on the outside, generally speaking, because those corners also have deep responsibility. You can have what's called free access, which I just went over in in cover three, as well as this next point. And this is the real key to the weakness of this defense when you're talking about its passing structure, is that if I come up here and run like a little hook route right there and a little hook route right there, I'm going to grab these safeties, and they're going to stay down. And what ends up happening is is you get a lot of teams that they would come and just run posts like that from one side or the other, probably not two posts obviously, but from one side or the other, you would run a hook to that side and then you would run a post over top of the safety. And what's called, you get the safety down, and you throw the post over the top. So that's maybe what's not great about this coverage. But if you have corners that you believe in that can play man coverage, then this is a great coverage because it creates the illusion that the offense can run the football, and yet they really can't because the safeties play so heavily down. They don't get depth. In fact, at the snap of the football, you'll see a lot of times the the safeties will just sit there and they won't move. Let's take a look at the video and I'll show you a cover four example, quarters example from this year. So here's an example of Ohio State running quarters against Indiana. Now, again, the corners can play up or back, it doesn't matter. So you see here on the left side, you've got a corner down and kind of a man technique. But you, you're going to watch these safeties, and they're not going to get depth. Normally, if you see two safeties out there, what you would want to one, run the football, or two, you would expect them to be in cover two. But they don't go to cover two. They don't have a deep half, they have a deep quarter, and they're doing that based on the number two release to their side. So watch Ohio State play this out. So watch Caleb Downs here to the right side of the offense, and he's just going to sit right there and look at him, just squat right there, and he grabs that release right over the top. And those, those safeties don't go anywhere. That's a great example of quarters coverage. And again, it's a very unique coverage because yes, it's zone because the linebackers are technically in zone defense, and and yet technically the safeties are in zone defense, but the corners are really in man. So it's also man, and the safeties can turn into man if the number two release runs vertically. So it's a very unique coverage. And again, you would run it to be much more sustainable in your run defense. And the weakness then is that your safeties can be down, and you can throw it up over the top to like a post route. But that's one of the coverages that I think is pretty prevalent right now in college football, in particular, when you've got guys at the safety position that are so good in run defense. So there you go, cover 1, 2, 3, and 4. You hear those terms all the time on Saturdays and Sundays, and now you know exactly what they [Music] mean.
Thank you for watching the Joel Class Show YouTube channel. And if you like this clip, make sure to like it and subscribe to the channel, and you can stay up to date on all of my college football coverage.