Each week Coach Bass brings his 30 years of NFL coaching experience to USA Football. Email Coach Bass your question.
Nathan sent the following question:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of man and zone coverage?
Hi Nathan,
The advantage of man coverage is that you get good tight coverage on all the receivers. The disadvantage is that your players must be equal to or better athletes than the players that they are assigned to cover.
In man-to-man coverage, it is essential to have good pass rush with pressure on the quarterback, and you always need to evaluate each of your coverage personnel against the offensive player that you are asking him to cover and not just your corners against their wide receivers. It is also important to be alert to any extra wide receivers that the offense may substitute into the game to guarantee that you attain correct matchups.
In zone coverage, you can be better at protecting against the deep pass and have the ability to play the run a little better. The disadvantage is that you do not have the tight coverage that you have in man coverage, and the offense can design pass routes that will usually leave one receiver out of three open to receive the ball.
The goal of the offense, when facing zone coverage, is to design pass routes, either by the depth of the routes or on the same plane across the field, where they can achieve a ratio of three receivers versus two of your defensive coverage players.
They do this by having three offensive receivers line up in one line on the field where you will only have two defenders to cover that area of the field.
Examples would be:
One deep (Z Up), one running a medium pass route (Y Out), and a back in the flat (FB Flat). They might have a wide receiver run a route at 10 yards to the sideline (X Out), have the back on that side hook at 7 yards (HB Stop) and the tight end run across the field on a hook route on that side of the formation (TE Hook Opposite) on the opposite side of his original alignment in the original formation.
It is hard to be successful featuring both styles of coverage, it is better to decide and feature just one, because of the limited practice time that we all face in our teaching. You might want to feature one and then develop a good sound blitz package to supplement your basic coverage.
For both styles of coverage, you should teach the basic coverage techniques - stance, start, back pedal, angle back pedal and changing from a back pedal to a forward run, as these are techniques that your players will need in blitz coverage. Even though all of these techniques are vital to man-to-man coverage, they can easily be used when your defensive players are moving into their designated zones.
Your choice of which pass coverage to feature should be twofold - based first on the physical ability of your coverage people and whether they are they fast enough to run with the receivers they need to cover and second based on the offense that you expect to face.
Coach Tom Bass
Coach Tom Bass, the technical writer and advisor for USA Football, is a 30-year NFL coach who has also authored several books, including "Play Football the NFL Way" - the first "how to" book ever authorized and published by the NFL. Coach Bass is happy to personally autograph his books to you. Book ordering information can be found at http://www.coachbass.com/.
