The Problem With Our Pass Scheme
This is purely scheme, so anyone who shouts out “Linebackers!” is technically correct, but this isn’t the place. We have a purely schematic issue that has arisen, and contributed in no small part to our loss on Saturday. I mentioned it last night (#7), but I thought I would deeper illustrate what I mean.
In the simplest words possible, our cornerbacks have to be the deep coverage because we need the safeties for run support. That’s why they give up so much cushion. As we saw on OU’s first scoring drive, if the WR beats our corner deep, he’s screwed. On OU’s first deep completion, Marcus Griffin was lined up 6 yards off the ball. That’s not a deep safety. That’s a Roy Williams rover type deal.
Here is how it works. Both safeties read the end man on the line of scrimmage (EMOL), be it a tackle or a tight end:
If the EMOL read is a run, the safeties come up in run support:
If it’s a pass read, the help on the outside receiver
There is a similar explanation here.
It’s a little more in depth. But I want to focus on two things in particular. Now, the cover 4 is a fine coverage. Lots of good teams run it. The mistake we’ve made is taking a coverage and making it a defense. We don’t do anything else. Most teams that do what we do switch it up with cover 2. Why? It changes the strength of the coverage. Here is a still image from frame 21 of the previous picture:
Notice how, yards into the pattern, there isn’t anyone capable of stopping a hitch or an out route. This is the main weakness of the coverage. Bradford was having trouble timing the slant routes correctly, so late in the game, they were just taking 7-8 yards on out routes on first down and setting themselves up with 2nd and shorts constantly. Only time we ever stopped them once they adopted this form of attack was when a receiver dropped a ball, or Bradford threw a bad pass.
Early in the game OU tested our midgets, just going deep. We defended that very well. Even on the two completed passes that led to the first TD, Foster and Palmer had decent coverage, they just couldn’t handle the perfectly thrown ball and then Kelly’s size. I just wanted to point this out because OU started the game hitting one weakness, then switched to another. Must be nice, having a staff that watches film.
Anyway, this is the reason you can’t get by with one coverage. Most cover 2 teams have cover 4 as a change up, and vice versa. This is why:
Now the corners can squat on short routes to keep the QB from pecking away at us. On the right, the CB is in position to cover any short route and at least make it a challenge to complete. If the WR goes deep, as on the left, we have a safety back to help. Now we are, get ready for this, making the QB have to read a coverage. Not only does this shake his accuracy, since he doesn’t have time to collect himself (see: McCoy, Colt), but it gives our pass rush another second or two to get into the backfield.
The other weakness in the cover 4 (for us) is that our safeties are not that great in run support, so we don’t even get that much out of it. If we went to a cover 2 system with cover 4 thrown in and let our best LBs play to help stop the run with 7 guys, we’d be a pretty good defense. As it is, we are an average one that lets teams move down the field with relative ease (don’t forget, Josh Freeman started the game something like 11/12 doing the same thing).
Maybe next year.
October 7, 2007 at 5:29 pm
So, basically the corners (Palmer) played tight cover 4 in the early going without safety help and OU kept challenging deep. Eventually they connected. Afterward, in the 2nd half, the corners played loose in cover 4 and Bradford played short pitch and catch. For Texas, it was pick your poison - the corners ain’t getting any help.
The final TD was a deep pass where it appeared the corner thought he had deep help from the safety. Jackson arrived about 10 yards late. Perhaps this was cover 2, but if so, it was poorly executed.
Good post. A great front 7 makes a big difference. Get the right LB’s out there, now!
October 7, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I was there and watched carefully. If we played a single snap of any other coverage I completely missed it. Our corners are alone along the sidelines at all times.
October 7, 2007 at 7:24 pm
The deep passes that were completed were not schematic problems, the players made the wrong read. The backside safety bit on play action and the WR simply ran his route to the vacated portion of the field.
We play cover 2 just as much as we play cover 4.
October 7, 2007 at 7:35 pm
I disagree, we don’t run it at all.
One the first deep ball Marcus Griffin lined up, literally, 6-7 yards deep. He and Palmer got beat by a perfect throw. Right after that, the Kelly catch to the 1, was cover 4 that a safety bit on and left Foster all alone to make a play. He played it pretty well but Kelly was too big and talented and caught it anyway. That’s another downside of cover 4, the playaction.
I don’t remember the third deep ball. Someone will have to remind me. I remember the 30ish yard pass for a TD that both the safety and the corner jumped the shallow route and let Kelly run by his damn self into the endzone. Was that it?
October 7, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Well, you can disagree all you want. You are wrong. If you can’t tell the difference between cover 2 and cover 4, I can’t help you.
I understand that the majority of the content here is satire, and it is great. Maybe I am just missing the line between joke and an attempt at a real conversation about football strategy. If you really think that our ONLY pass defense is cover 4, then you just don’t know enough about football to understand what you are watching.
Griffin is a very aggressive safety, and often breaks from his responsibility to make a play. He is right most of the time, and leads the team in tackles because of it. When he is wrong, it is ugly. When you play OU, you are keyed up and want to make the big play. He got fooled by a play fake and it cost us.
Like a typical fan, you see a player do something on the field and you scream that the coach is an idiot. Newsflash: Sometimes players do things on a field that are not coached. I can promise that our linebackers do perform drills in practice where they try to perfect the art of diving for a running back’s feet. Killabrew does not spend 5 minutes of each practice working on getting his facemask and late hit penalties down to perfection. Sometimes the kids just make a mistake. Sometimes they get fooled. Sometimes the other team makes a great play. And yes, sometimes we get caught in a bad defense.
October 7, 2007 at 9:50 pm
That was a close game. It could’ve gone either way. I’m just glad that we played hard and with passion. Still, the better team won. Maybe we’ll get them next year. We should be good the rest of the year if we played as hard as we did this weekend. Two L, I can live with that.
Hook’em
October 7, 2007 at 10:06 pm
“Griffin is a very aggressive safety, and often breaks from his responsibility to make a play. He is right most of the time, and leads the team in tackles because of it. When he is wrong, it is ugly. When you play OU, you are keyed up and want to make the big play. He got fooled by a play fake and it cost us.”
He didn’t bite. He lined up there. He lined up just behind the LB. That is not what a cover 2 safety does no matter how aggressive he is. That would just be stupid.
Second, if we were in cover 2 for Kelly’s catch, there would’ve been a safety within, oh, 30 yards of him. There wasn’t. Nor would Foster be the primary pass defender on it.
Secondly, Griffin doesn’t lead the team in tackles because he’s aggressive, he leads them because we play exclusive cover 4 and our LBs and Jackson are non-entities. In fact, having a safety lead the team in tackles would seem to strengthen my arugement.
Third, there is that whole thing where Duane Akina said outright that we only play cover 4. He said it after last year. Then he said he wouldn’t change it this year.
Fourth, if we played cover 2, ever, we would line up our CBs closer than ten yards to the WR and not have him backpedal every play. Like I said, I was there, I watched it.
I know you played, I know you were a DB, but believe me, I’m not some idiot fan. Don’t pull that crap here.
October 7, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Why do I never feel confident that we’ll hold on 3rd-and-long?
October 8, 2007 at 12:27 am
Recent history?
October 8, 2007 at 8:43 am
CA,
I don’t think that “Cover 4″ is what you think it is.
We start about 80% of our defensive snaps from a cover 2 shell. You can’t tell what the coverage is going to be by the depth of the corners. It is designed to be that way. We have set defenses where we will have the corners pressing to give a man-to-man look, and then have them bail into 2, 3, or 4, or play man out of it. Coach Akina gives the corners the freedom to line up at a depth that they want to to change up the look of the defense and maintain their responsibility.
“He lined up just behind the LB. That is not what a cover 2 safety does no matter how aggressive he is.”
That’s not where a cover 4 safety lines up either. Once again, I am not sure you know what Cover 4 is.
You may not be an “idiot fan” but you don’t know much about our pass coverages. We damn sure don’t run “Cover 4″ for the entire game. Our safeties don’t ever read an offensive lineman, and it is impossible to play cover 4 with a safety in the box. You defeat your own argument.
Nice work with the graphics. BTW.
October 8, 2007 at 9:22 am
Well obviously I’m not in the coaches meetings or the booth, but I’m willing to bet I’m more correct than you.
October 8, 2007 at 9:45 am
Cripple Fight!!
October 8, 2007 at 10:58 am
Don’t ever ask a Navy man how much he’s had to drink because its no one’s goddamn business…
October 8, 2007 at 11:31 am
How do you measure yourself against other golfer’s Ty?
October 8, 2007 at 11:50 am
Linebackers!
October 10, 2007 at 7:29 am
Linebackers what are these things called Linebackers?
October 11, 2007 at 5:52 am
Tech will hang half a hundred on us if we do not correct our schemes and play our younger LBs that have more speed than our older LBs.
Hook’em
October 11, 2007 at 8:42 am
You say half a hundred I say fiddy
October 12, 2007 at 12:37 am
Most people use cover 4 to describe when both safeties and both corners drop deep. Just like cover 2 means two deep defenders, cover 3 means 3, etc.
The defense in this post is often described with something like cover 2 switch. So the little spat here is probably due to terminology.
That said, we do seem to run this switch defense a whole lot, and we hardly ever run a cover 2. You can tell because our corners are always turning and running with the WRs on deep patterns. If it was cover 2, they would bump those guys and then let them go.
The only one of those deep balls where we might have been playing cover 2 was the last TD to Kelly. Palmer and Jackson both stayed in the short zone until Jackson saw the ball going deep. I don’t know which one of them screwed up there.
October 12, 2007 at 6:00 am
What is Tampa 2?
October 12, 2007 at 6:01 am
Based on the OU game our rush D looked solid except on a few plays. Darry is a joke and Bobino should be replaced by Kindle. If our LBs could hit the gaps and shut down the run the safeties could loosen up giving the corners more support. I think it all starts with the LBs. The D line is solid especially with Orakpo back.
October 12, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Tampa 2 is a cover 2 with the middle linebacker dropping deeper in the middle of the field to cover the seam route instead of the crossing pattern underneath.
October 17, 2007 at 5:30 am
Matt - Thanks for the information. I will be an expert in no time.
Bring on some more football discussion!!
October 21, 2007 at 8:38 pm
NavyHorn bitchslapped ChrisApplewhite here.
October 21, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I watched the OU game again. We ran man about a dozen times, cover 3 a few times, and cover 2 twice, including zero times on the final couple drives when OU was eating us up short and outside.
And even when we play cover 2, as evidenced by the last two games, we still give up too much cushion on the outside.
I stand by my point.
October 21, 2007 at 10:55 pm
I got my exact numbers:
there were 39 pass attempts that i counted.
11 i couldn’t tell what the coverage was, either the camera was too shallow or the pass was too quick for anyone to drop. 1 was a goalline pass. that leaves 27 passes:
man - 8
two - 3
three - 5
four - 11
Most of the cover three situations (at least 4) were because of a trips alignment or zone blitz. You can’t really run cover 4 against trips, and 3 is an easy coverage to zone blitz from. That makes sense. It still gives cushion on the outside.
Most of the man came early. We only ran it twice in the 4th quarter.
Ditto the cover 2. We ran it once in the 4th.
I went back and looked at the trips formations vs. the balanced ones. Against trips, cover 4 doesn’t really work as well and isn’t as much of an option. So obviously, you’d expect to see more of a difference:
Trips:
Man - 4
Two - 1
Three - 3 (with 2 zone blitzes)
Four - 2
Balanced:
Man - 3
Two - 2
Three - 3 (2 zone blitzes)
Four - 9
Those are the 27 I could tell. 53% of the time, in a balance formation, we ran cover 4. In the fourth quarter, that number rose to 75%.
So what was the point of my post? That we give up too much cushion on the corner because our safeties play so aggressively. I made specific mention of the fourth quarter. We ran cover two ONCE, and still had our CBs like 9 years off.
We did run more variety than I caught at the game. I should not have said we don’t run anything else. Hyperbole, thy name is ChrisApplewhite.
Overall, we ran hard corners, hypothetically, 3 times all game (not including run plays, of course), and once in the fourth. From watching our last three games, when we go cover two, we still have our corners play a little too deep.
Again, I stand by my point.