Bob Pentland is back for his first lengthy football piece, where he discusses the trendy zone blitz. As expected, Bob is dropping some serious knowledge here. Your assignment is to read this and see if you can’t spot the real thing this weekend as the college season kicks off. Maybe you can impress your buddies with some insider knowledge!
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Eleven
It happens so often in blitzing situations anymore that we don’t even flinch when a 300 pound defensive lineman drops into pass coverage. It often seems silly to take a guy who normally on passing downs has underwear stained dreams of unprotected QB spines, only to flip things and make him do something he has practiced only a handful of times. How has the game evolved to a point that the sharpest defensive minds will try to execute something that seems so askew to traditional thought? In the following morass, I’m going to try and explain exactly what a zone blitz is, and why teams are so willing to use the concept.
My knowledge of football history is not as strong as others, so I won’t claim to know who did what first and when. I do, however, have a good working understanding of hot routes, how and why teams use them, and how the zone blitz is a natural evolutionary concept to counter offensive pre-snap reads.

To make this whole thing easier I’m going to create a standard situation in which to expect a passing situation. Let’s say it’s third and six on the +45 and the ball is on the left hash. Normal time to expect either a pass or something else based off of a pass look (screen/draw). For simplicities sake we’ll use the following formation and routes, which are both packages that every college team in the country runs and I will probably use frequently for examples:

This is a standard cover three beater, as it tries to high low the free safety, and simple crossing routes are used to try and widen out the LB’s to create a passing seam to the dig route (X) or post (Z). It’s also an effective play against a cover 1 as the dig is one of the toughest covers 1 on 1. Depending on protection schemes, the TB’s responsibility will change, for this example, we will assume he flares to the right (more field, and more likely a Sam LB if we are expecting cover three). We’re assuming from the start by our play selection that the defense is running a cover three, so that’s what kind of look we’ll use for this example. Basically, the offensive coordinator has reason to expect the D to run a cover three in this situation. We’ll also assume a standard 4-3 to keep it simple:

OK, as I said in the last segment, terminology changes wherever you go, so I’ll give a quick run-down of the one I’m using today:
E – Quick-side/weak-side end
N – Nose guard. Normally plays a shade on the center or even head up
3 – 3 technique. Key guy in stopping the run as he’s double-teamed a ton
B – Bull end, just another name for strong side end
W – Will/weak-side LB
M – Mike/middle LB
S – Sam/strong-side LB
DB’s are same as always, Corners and then strong and free safeties
As this discussion is about zone blitzes, I should explain a bit about them before we get too far. Defense is all about numbers. You want things to be balanced on both sides of the ball for run protection, and you always want to have enough guys around to cover all of the eligible receivers. Used to be, if an offense was getting killed by the blitz they’d just keep as many guys in for protection as possible, and count on their receivers ability to beat the defenses DB’s. Fortunately, someone realized that if a defender was blitzing, then we know for a fact that there is going to be a hole in the spot he vacated. So they started coaching QB’s and WR’s that when they see an LB blitzing, instead of running the route planned, make a sight adjust and run to the empty spot. So rather than keeping extra guys in for protection, the new thought was to spread the D out as far as possible, and then if they tried to blitz with someone and you could recognize it, you could exploit that open spot in a defense with the nearest receiver. I’ll never forget the first time we got this to work in high school and I hit our running back on a quick release as two LB’s ran by him on the blitz. Ten yard pass that went for sixty and six on the board; yes I got laid later that night, and no, it didn’t feel as good as that play.
As I said earlier, defense is all about numbers. Therefore, conventional wisdom dictated that it was very dangerous to run a zone behind a 6 man pass rush. It would leave you with five men covering five potential receivers in a lot of open shared space. It was considered better to run cover zero, where your remaining defenders would all be manned up on a receiver. If you have the athletes, you can roll the dice like this, but if the pass rush doesn’t get to the QB, you’re asking for trouble. At some point, some brilliant DC realized that the threat of a DL’s rush could occupy an OL, and still allow a rushing LB the space needed to get serious pressure. After the development of the hot route, another DQ realized that if you could trick a QB into reading the blitz in one area, even though that LB does come, you could drop a DL into that same vacated area, hopefully taking away that option, while still getting pressure on the QB. It then became possible to still run zone coverage behind a pass rush involving two athletic and fast LB’s. I’ll draw a scenario up below:

This is still a 4-3 with a cover 3 look, but it obviously looks as if the W and M are coming. We also see that the FS is walked up and covering up our H a bit, but we know that if we get the ball to the H immediately, we should have 5 yards, with the possibility of more. In a perfect world, the H will recognize the blitz and realize that instead of running the short drag the play calls for, he should look for the ball quickly and expect it in the spot vacated by the W and M. If you look at the way the DB’s are aligned, it’s easy to imagine a cover zero – C on X, FS on H, S on the TB, SS on Y, and the other corner on Z. This is well and good, if you can get to the QB quickly. But there is a lot of space out there, and a decent WR should always be able to get a bit of space quickly, against even good man coverage. But what if we just drop the E into the spot we expect that H to look for the hot route? At the snap it will look like the same as above, but imagine a cover 3 behind it and see how it changes right after the snap (I’ll leave the original position in parentheses):

Looks a little confusing, but with some imagination, you can imagine how it will look real-time. Responsibilities being:
E – hook to flats – meaning he drops looking for an immediate threat behind him (H on a hot route) and then looks for a man moving towards the flats (outside of the T to the sideline)
N – rushing lane
3 – rushing lane
B – rushing lane
W – rush/outside contain (no one out of the back field gets wider than him)
M – rushing lane
S – middle of the formation pass drop
SS – hook to flats on the strong side
C’s – outside thirds
FS – deep middle third
The trick is to convince the QB and WR’s that both W and M are coming, which shouldn’t be hard as they ARE coming. It’s also important the that the DL doesn’t tip things off by being in a different stance, or lined up further from the LOS than normal. Then you should be able to expect the O to sight adjust their routes. As far as pass protection goes, you make it very hard on the left tackle and left guard. As far as they are concerned, they have to respect the immediate threat. Meaning, if the D aligns like above, the guard is expecting center help on the Nose and the right guard to pick up the Mike so he can take care of the End and the Tackle can get the Will. That’s expecting a lot of communication to be executed properly, and expecting tough blocks out of both the center and right guard (in this situation you would expect the right tackle to step down and get the three technique while the tailback should either stay in and block the Bull, or hold him with his swing route). Even though the end doesn’t come, it’s likely the o-line will lose a step on one of the rushers before they react to the end not coming, and everyone from the left guard right has to switch their responsibilities a man to right. Seeing stuff like this will make you understand why those in the know feel that offensive line is one of the toughest positions in all of sports.
It’s much like chess or war, feints on feints on feints. Convince the other guy beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are doing A, so you expect him to do B, all the while really running C. This is the stuff that I truly love about the sport, and is why coaches that can read their opponents are tremendously successful.
So that’s a real quick and extremely dirty look at the zone blitz. As always, you got questions, drop ’em and I’ll give them my best.
— Bob Pentland
Eleven Archives
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Eleven – 1 – Introduction
Eleven – 2 – The Zone Blitz
Eleven – 3 – The Cover Two
Eleven – 4 – Zone Blocking
Eleven – 5 – The Bootleg
Eleven – 6 – Extra Points And Field Goals