Jaire Alexander's INT

or, Slingshot to Heaven

There is no perfect defensive structure. If there was, everyone would be running it. Every defense carries its own strengths and weaknesses. In order to mitigate those weaknesses, little wrinkles and rules are built into the structure.

Take two-high defenses, for example. Here is an overly simplistic look at the back-end of a basic, Cover 2 defense.

Pretty easy to spot where you can beat that deep, right? Dot the middle of the field, right between the two dropping safeties. Once teams find ways to exploit that, how do you stop it, short of becoming a one-high team?

The roots of that answer lie in Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain defense, where Bud Carson used the uber-athletic and intelligent Jack Lambert to cover up that deep hole in the middle from his linebacker spot. Much in the same way that the West Coast Offense wasn’t born on the West Coast, the Tampa 2 wasn’t born in Tampa Bay. Sure, Tony Dungy pushed it to new heights when he started his coaching career, but it was born in Pittsburgh.

Dropping that linebacker closed off one area of weakness but opened another. The Texas concept was born out of attacking the area vacated by the linebacker, and round and round we go.

We’re not here today to talk about Tampa 2, but we’re also not here to not talk about it. I think.

Let’s talk about coverage families. You can slice these up a thousand different ways, but there are two main ways to group deep coverages: Middle Of Field Closed (MOFC) and Middle Of Field Open (MOFO). Defined simply, when in the coverage, where are the safeties in terms of the middle of the field.

MOFC is your one-high family of coverages (Cover 1 Man Free, Cover 3, etc.). These defenses place a safety in the middle of the field. With this defense, your attack zones are on the boundary or up the seam between coverage zones.

MOFO is your two-high family of coverages (Cover 2, Quarters, Cover 6, etc.). These are your split safety looks. With this defense, your attack zones are the middle of the field or the sidelines between cornerbacks and safeties. A nice route combo containing a post route is your best friend.

With that in mind, let’s look at this play from the Week 3 Packers/49ers game. The 49ers are down 10-0 and are looking to make something happen. The Packers are showing a Quarters shell pre-snap, and the 49ers have something dialed up to attack it: a Portland concept, with a dig from the right side and a post from George Kittle [85] on the right.

The idea behind this is to trigger the deep middle safety on the right to crash the dig route, which will open space downfield for the post route. Kittle can get inside leverage on a defender and outrun him to the boundary.

Jaire Alexander [23] is the Quarters coverage man on the boundary opposite Kittle (blue ring around him in the above picture).

The part I described above? It works perfectly. There’s nice depth on the dig route, which brings the safety up and opens space downfield. But that dig route does something else: it releases Alexander of his responsibilities in that zone. Once that route declares as a dig, Alexander shifts to play the role of post-robber. (I recently heard Nate Tice refer to this as a “slingshot” technique, and he seems smart so I’m going to roll with that terminology.)

There are a lot of different ways to run Match Quarters coverage; the very foundation of it is a series of levers and triggers. I don’t know what this specific call is, but I do not believe this is Alexander going rogue. The in-cutting route released him of that current responsibility, so he moved to his next one. If two-high defenses are susceptible to getting beat by a post route, put in triggers to try to take that away.

Nice, quick reaction from Alexander. He’s off to take away the post as soon as the route in front of him declares itself as a dig route. And then, of course, tremendous athleticism and closing speed to not only get to the post, but to pick off this pass and get a nice, 30 yard return out of it.

If a defense has a weakness that is getting exploited, the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with this defense?” The question is “What tweaks can we make that can help to cover that weakness?” Again, there is no such thing as a perfect defense, but putting in these triggers can make a world of difference.

Of course, having a Jaire Alexander also helps.