During his speech for Derrick Thomas’ posthumous Hall of Fame induction, former Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson told a story about a young defensive coordinator named Bill Cowher who thought he had come up with a great new scheme involving his talented pass rusher.
“In the spring of 1990, Bill Cowher came to [Chiefs coach] Marty [Schottenheimer], said ‘Marty, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we do this on the defense?’” Peterson recalled. “’We’ll get Derrick lined up in his three-point stance in his normal position, right outside linebacker. Then on the snap of the ball, we’ll drop him into coverage [and] we’ll bring a couple of guys.’”
On paper, it makes some sense to use Derrick Thomas as a decoy. If an offensive line is sliding his way, why not overload the other side of the protection? This was the theory behind the fire zone blitz concept made famous at the NFL level by Dick LaBeau, which was growing in popularity around the league at that time. Cowher recognized the trend and wanted in. Schottenheimer and Peterson had a different take.
“I said, ‘Bill, that’s a very interesting concept. Just answer me one question: Why would we be having our best pass rusher run away from the quarterback?’ Derrick that year had 20 sacks, and I think without question, that’s called great coaching.”
Over the course of this series, I’ve argued that NFL defenses should rush the passer more aggressively and have looked at different ways the more creative defensive play-callers go about doing so. But I want to make one thing clear: Personnel should be the most important factor when making these decisions. If you have a Derrick Thomas or a defensive line like the one the 49ers have built over the past few years, it doesn’t make much sense to run creepers or big blitzes.
Chris Vasseur, an influential high school defensive coordinator and host of the popular Make Defense Great Again podcast, put it best:
“Every once in a while you might drop a great pass rusher [into coverage]. But if you’re dropping Von Miller a lot, you’re an asshole.”
No, you should not be dropping Von Miller or Derrick Thomas or Nick Bosa into coverage very often, but those guys are hard to find and very expensive to keep. If you’re one of the many NFL teams that don’t have one of those studs on the roster, then you better get creative.
The nature of getting creative, though, has changed because offenses are so much more diverse than they once were. It’s no longer enough to just send an old fire zone blitz now that spread offenses allow quarterbacks to utilize the width of the field.
“Playing three-deep, three-under is not great,” Vasseur told me, “when they’re releasing five out into the route, because they can stretch you horizontally.”
Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, those fire zones made more sense. Offenses were playing with multiple bodies in the backfield and weren’t able to exploit the flats or underneath. They eventually adapted and evolved to combat the three-deep, three-under coverages that became the default blitz coverage. The “Greatest Show on Turf” Rams were one of the products of that evolution, says former Vikings coach Mike Tice.
“One of the guys who was on the forefront of the new era of football was Mike Martz.” Tice told me. “He had ‘hots’ built into his routes and that created explosive gains. The defense was creating a hole in the coverage and Martz did a great job of exploiting those holes. That’s what football has gone to now: Spread the field out, make the defense defend the entire field. But in order to do that, you get fewer blockers.”
You can send that extra rusher and drop a defensive end, but now that 260-pound player has to cover Isaac Bruce on a quick slant or Marshall Faulk out of the backfield. That’s not ideal. The only way to combat that was to be really talented, like Tony Dungy’s Buccaneers were at the time, or creative with your pressures, like Jim Johnson’s Eagles were at the time.
At the college level, it didn’t take long for the spread to, well, spread, and the first inclination for defensive coaches was to attack it. But they were having the same problems NFL defensive coordinators were having with the Rams.
“Now, I don’t have the PFF data to back this up — this is just my gut — but here’s what I think happened,” Vasseur says. “Offenses spread out and defenses were like ‘[Expletive] you. We’re going to bring the house.’ And offenses were able to make them pay. As soon as they were able to make them pay, then everybody backed off. In college, everybody played four-down and played quarters or Cover 2. Recently, there’s been a shift towards getting more creative.”
That creativity has taken many forms at the college level:
- Dave Aranda’s creepers at LSU, which I’ve written about extensively
- Don Brown’s aggressive man pressures, which feature mind-boggling stunts and games that wreak havoc on opposing offensive lines.
- Manny Diaz’s fire zones that eschew the tradition of plugging gaps and urges blitzing linebackers and stunting linemen to ‘run to daylight.’
- Or just about everything Nick Saban and his disciples do (we’ve written about his pattern matching philosophy)
But when I think of a scheme that’s on the cutting edge, at least from the NFL perspective, it’s Brent Venables’ Clemson defense. Especially when it comes to pressure.
One of Venables’ pressure concepts aims to take away the “hots” that Martz built into his play designs to beat more traditional blitzes, while not sacrificing numbers in the pass rush. It is fittingly referred to as “hot” coverage, and it was popularized by Mark Dantonio and Pat Narduzzi at Michigan State. Hot coverage is a more aggressive version of the old fire zone blitzes.
Instead of a five-man rush, you have six rushers going after the quarterback, leaving only five zone coverage players in a three-deep, two under distribution.
The seam players — labeled “poach” above — are the key to the coverage. They’ll read the quarterback’s eyes and position themselves based on where he looks. If the quarterback looks to your side, you hold your ground and try to get into any throwing windows. If the quarterback looks away from your side, you squeeze to the middle of the field.
The backside corner gets similar instructions against a two-receiver side. If the quarterback looks to the opposite side, Venables tells his corners to overlap to the inside receiver because it’s hard for the quarterback to get all the way to the backside receiver with a six-man rush bearing down on him. To account for running backs going to the flats, which would overload the “hot” player, defensive ends will “peel” with the back if he goes out for a pass.
Venables uses basketball team names for his different hot pressures — Spurs, Clippers, Mavericks, etc. — and my totally uneducated theory on that choice is how this football version of a 2-3 zone shifts like one you’d see in basketball. Only instead of the position of the ball dictating how the zone shifts in unison, it’s the vision of the quarterback that dictates where players should move.
This may not sound like a viable concept at the NFL level, where quarterbacks are much better, but the Colts actually used these pressures last season and had some success with them. While Venables and Narduzzi will usually run them out of a two-deep shell, Colts defensive coordinator Matt Eberflus called them with various pre-snap looks. Darius Leonard’s pick-6 of Jameis Winston came on a three-deep, two under concept where he lined up over center before snap.
If you read Part 3 of this series, you’ll recognize the concept behind Venables’ “Miami” pressure, a more extreme version of the read blitzes the Patriots bullied Sam Darnold with during the “seeing ghosts” game. Instead of having certain pass rushers read the turn of specific blockers, like the Patriots do, any rusher who is engaged by a blocker will drop into coverage.
That leads to hilarious plays like this one where Clemson gets a sack with a one-man pass rush.
None of the concepts I’ve covered throughout this series are really new. A lot of them date back to the early 2000s and even the 1990s, but they’ve been repackaged and their popularity has grown at the college level. As that continues, it’s only a matter of time before defensive coaches at the NFL take notice. Some of the best ones, who don’t have a Derrick Thomas to run around the edge and sack the quarterback, have already done so.
The rest of the league should work to catch up, though. It took too long for offensive coaches to truly embrace the pass-first spread offense that we know, from looking at hard data, is more effective. And now it’s taking too long for defensive coaches to break from conservative schemes and truly get creative about forcing offenses into mismatches — even though, again, we can look at the numbers and see that creating pressure is essential.
It doesn’t have to be the Ravens’ protection-dictating looks we covered in Part 2 or the Patriots’ Cover 0 blitzes covered in Part 3 or the Titans’ creepers covered in Part 4. There are countless pressure concepts out there that we did not touch on in this series. Just try something. Even “Engage Eight” might be a better option than calling a standard four-man rush and just hoping it gets home.