x and o

Great stuff here with beautiful All-22 screen grabs.

The Patriots have a ferocious front seven. It’s allowed Belichick (and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia) to predominantly use two-deep safety concepts throughout the season. However, that front seven did not do well against Baltimore in Week 3. For whatever reason, New England’s linebackers were reactionary and undisciplined that night. The question is: how spooked is Belichick by that Week 3 film? Does he believe his linebackers just had a bad night? Or does he believe the Ravens run game is capable of ruining his team’s season? (Belichick surely remembers the 2009 Wild Card Weekend, when the Ravens went into Foxboro and rushed for 234 yards on 52 attempts.)

Good stuff for the X and O nerds out there like me.

Good X and O stuff as always from Chris Brown…

Nick Saban, currently the head coach at Alabama, was the defensive coordinator under Bill Belichick when the two were with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s. While speaking to high school coaches at a recent clinic, Saban summed up the early problems of traditional spot-dropping zone coverage: “Well, when Marino’s throwing it, that old break on the ball shit don’t work.”

The answer that Saban, Belichick, and many others developed was “pattern-match” coverage — essentially man coverage that uses zone principles to identify the matchups. As Saban explained at the 2010 Coach of the Year Clinics Football Manual clinic:

You can play coverages in three ways. You can play zone, man, or pattern-match man. Pattern-match man is a coverage that plays the pattern after the pattern distribution. That means you pick up in man coverage after the receivers make their initial breaks and cuts. We number receivers from the outside going inside. If the number-one receiver crosses with the number-two receiver, we do not pick up the man coverage until they define where they are going.