A debate about the two-high safeties defense—or, as you may know it, the “Tampa 2″—broke out on ESPN’s Get Up after Mel Kiper Jr. said it should be outlawed because he wants to see more downfield shots rather than bubble screens and checkdowns.
“The NFL is getting ruined by these two high safeties,” Kiper said.
Dan Orlovsky was tasked with explaining what this alignment was, and credited former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Tony Dungy for creating it, stating that “2-high safeties has been around for a long time, Tony Dungy made the ‘Tampa 2’ defense famous down there.”
While Dungy and the Buccaneers may have made it more of a household name to a wider audience, the former Buccaneers coach made sure to set the record straight. “Thanks, Dan, for including me in the legacy of Cover 2, but the Tampa version wasn’t near the beginning of the story,” Dungy said on his X account in response to Orlovsky’s history lesson.
The Cover 2 defense was actually introduced to the NFL in 1973, by Bud Carlson and the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dungy would say, and the Hall of Fame coach took the Tampa version right out of their 1977 playbook, which he received as a rookie DB for the Steelers.
Dungy spent time interacting with comments and giving a history lesson on the defense and suspected that the defense was heralded as “Tampa 2” simply because “people hadn’t seen it in a while.”