Questions and Answers: Responding to the offensive problems teams present

As I have written before, football is undoubtedly an offensive game right now. Wide-open offenses expose poor tacklers and pass defenders. They pose questions that defenses must answer; questions including, reading, isolating, and double-teaming defenders and forcing them to be wrong. We want to flip this on its head and make offenses answer how they will block or defend against our defenses. The simplest way to do this is simply put an extra player where the offense wants to attack. We want to cloud reads and place extra players where the offense wants to go. Again, we want to make the offense have to answer how to block us or attack our coverages.

So when we game plan, we want to think about what a team likes to do and give our players leverage and numbers. And we want to have answers in our base playbook that aren't crazy gambles. This gives us a chance to stay coverage sound and not have to bring several extra men.We do have those options, but we want to look at these first.

I want to start this series with a two-back team. The reason I used a two-back team is because these types of teams can gives us trouble schematically. Our defense is undoubtedly designed to stop teams that spread out. Conversely, we are most at risk with teams that like to pound the ball up the middle. Our A gaps are exposed, and if our nose, mike and will don't work together well, then isolation all day will hurt us.

At the risk of being generic, our defense is a 3-4 two-gap team, relying quite a bit on Cover 3. We also run fire zones, which are by nature Cover 3, so 3 is big for us. If we can't run that, we are not going to be successful as a defense. We like those against spread teams.

If want to see our base scheme, I wrote a post on that here. The terminology has changed a little, but this is what we run.

As I side before, our weakness is the A gaps. We need to have a big stud at the nose guard position to really make this scheme work. When we don't have that (and who does?) we need to get more creative. We see a lot of isolation and a lot of power. In fact, the team that won our league made a living all year off isolation, when many of the other teams in our league are spreading it out.

For clarity's sake, let's say that we are operating against Power and Isolation. Diagrams below.

Let's say this how we all run Power, ok?

And Isolation!

Here are our easy solutions to these plays.