Teaching Defense to Football Coaches who want to Dominate on the Field
I just answered an e-mail and decided I should skip right over waiting for the Mailbag and get this one up.
What’s your take on defending the mid-line using the miami style 4-3? If you are facing a team that’ll give you a diet of it, do you go to the under front?
Thanks,
sb
Coach,
If you are choosing a defense to defend the option, the 4-3 Defense is a great choice. I like both the Over and Under, for different reasons, against the Midline.
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Once you’ve shown your 4-3 base defense against the Flexbone Offense, as we talked about before, adjustments need to be made. You can easily drop a safety down in to the box to create a new look.
By dropping the Safety down, we become a 1-high safety, 4-2-5 defense.
You can play around with option responsibilities here, pretty easily. This keeps the Quarterback guessing on his reads. But for starters, the reads are:
I really like the 4-3 Over against the Flexbone Offense, but can also see value in adjusting it. You can give your opponent a couple of different looks with just a slight change.
This is the base 4-3 Over against a Flexbone. In this case I’m putting the Ends in 5-techniques and walking the Sam and Will out over top of the slots. I just want to make sure that we don’t give an angle on the Linebackers to the slots.The Mike can move more head up to the Fullback. The fullback will be his world against this offense. [Read more...]
Sitting here snowed in today and I ran across a video of Utah’s Shovel Option on the Spread Offense blog. This is a great play, though I think you run a risk of putting the ball on the ground, more so than a traditional Triple Option (of course it is an incomplete pass, not a fumble – but still a no gain play). But the play has become a favorite in spread offenses around the country and one that our own team ran, so we saw enough of it in practice.
Warning: This is a pretty long post. There’s a lot to talk about in defending the option. I tried to separate it into sections, so you might want to print it out and read it at your convenience!
For reasons I won’t go into, there’s no question that I’m not expert in defending the option. In fact, if I ever run my own offense, you can bet there’ll be some element of option football in it. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! I also know that I have made a lot of mistakes in teaching how to defend the option, and spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to learn more about stopping an offense that doesn’t even need to block all of your players in order to score.The biggest mistake I have made in the past is in not taking all of the thinking out of the play for my defensive players. What it boils down to is gap responsibilities though, and knowing who is coming to your gap. Let your players understand what’s happening to them and why they should never look for the ball. [Read more...]
