NFL and College Cover 3 Fire Zone Pressures

 

NFL and COLLEGE FIRE ZONE CONCEPTS

NFL Fire Zones are a concept that have been around for a long time. This was prevelent back when some great coordinators like Dick Lebeau made them very popular. Sean Mcdermott, Todd Bowles, Leslie Frazier, Robert Saleh and more  have been running them for years.  This article will look at blitzes with cover 3 zone concepts. This will include running fire zones with 3 components:

1. Rolling the safety to the strong side

2. Rolling the safety to the weak side

3. Bringing the Safety to the middle of the defense to play the hook.

4. Showing cover 3 to one side and rolling the other way 

Lets start with the Jaguars in the 2022 playoffs vs the Chiefs.

They bring the cb and mike linebacker from a 3-2 mug look.

Chiefs vs Jags

Jags bring the cover 3 fire zone.

pressure-4 to a side weak with the cb off the edge.

Here is a great article talking about some of the foundations of the fire zone.  The Steelers made it famous under Dick Lebeau and Keith Butler used to run more when he first started but now is more a man free fire zone team. 

https://steelersdepot.com/2016/01/steelers-film-room-keith-butlers-fire-zones/

Fire zones can be run several ways.

Traditional blitzes-Sending a lb or safety and playing 3 under 3 deep or cover 2 behind it. You can also play some roll stuff depending on personnel groupings. But lets look at cover 3 variations in this article.

Creepers- These are blitzes where you send a linebacker from depth and drop a defensive end

Sim pressures- These are pressures where you will walk the lb up into the gaps and then run a variety of blitzes from there.  At times dropping a defensive end into coverage in the process. 

Coach Hoover  and Ron Roberts do a great job explaining this in the link below:

sim vs creeper pressures

But here are some examples of some of the fire zones you will see in college and the NFL and college level

Titans 2nd and 9 vs the Steelers

They bring a traditional sam off the edge and roll to cover 3. This is a common concept as teams can bring the sam or will lb and just roll the secondary the other way.

Cover 3

USC VS Washington DC Todd Orlando

1st and 10

USC on defense Runs  a 2 off the edge fire zone from their 3-4 defense. Nice rotation in the secondary.

Odd cross dog 

cover 3

USC drops the middle safety to the middle of the field

plays an aggressive cover 3 match concept.

Bills cover 3 rotation

3rd and 8

Bills vs Chargers.

Leslie Frazier against the rookie Justin Herbert. 

They show 3 strong but run the pressure and the coverage becomes 3 weak. 5 man pressure with the mike in a game with the defensive end. Nice design as the weak safety takes away the dig by #1 and can rally late to the back. The Mike does a nice job rocking back into coverage and taking away the bender by Allen. The rush gets home and disrupts Herbert enough to hit his arm as he throws. 

 

3rd and 9 Falcons Defense vs the Panthers offense. 

The Falcons go double mug and bring the safety off the edge. They roll to cover 3 opposite of where they aligned. 

Here is the video with the clip above.

Here the panthers versus The Cardinals from a 3 safety look. 

Washington University

Creeper-4 man pressure with cover 3

4-2 front

First the coverage

They run a nice stunt (considered a creeper in todays terminology) 

Mike blitzes the A gap

The DT goes b but will contain rush  and the de takes 2 steps upfield and loops tight for the sack. Nice stunt by Washington.  

Here's a few of Jimmy Lake's Washington fire zone pressures.

Panthers vs Cardinals

2nd and 1

 They bring a double a gap cross dog and drop the weak end opposite 3x1.  The weak side defensive end drops and plays the curl/flat.

Arizona Cardinals Fire Zone

On 2nd and 17 the Cardinals run America's favorite blitz 

Sam and mike lb,drop the de  and play cover 3 behind it. 

They play the weak safety as a curl read 3 defender and give up the playside flat. 

The Panthers have a screen called. 

In the Super Bowl, 3rd and 8, Bowles runs a 3 under 3 deep from a 3 safety high look. He drops the safety down to play the middle hook and brings a nice 5 man pressure with a game between the lb and de. 

The Pitt Panthers are a team in college that likes to run 3 under 3 deep fire zone principles.

In the situation below the ball is on the hash.
Pitt runs a corner fire or cowboy vs Notre Dame and it catches them off guard.

They end up getting great pressure and the qb panics and they get the sack.

Nice design by Pat Narduzzi.

Penn State defense cover 3 strong

Northwestern's 2020 Blueprint for defending Ohio State's potent Offense

In 2020, Northwestern was a very good defense and finished the year #1 in DFEI rankings link and were tough all year. They were also 4th in the country in points allowed only allowing 15.9 a game. Mike Hankwitz did an outstanding job that year and after the year retired. Great coach.

Northwestern played Ohio State in 2020. Northwestern held Ohio State to 22 points in a hard fought 22-10 loss. The game was close and Northwestern's defense gave Justin Fields trouble all day.  They held him to 12/27 passing for 114 yards and 2 interceptions. It was Ohio State's lowest point total of the season, way below their point average of 41 points per game. 

In the last 3 years Ohio State's tremendous offense  has averaged:

2019 47 points per game

2020. 41 points per game

2021 45 points per game

Although they hade 513 yards of offense, the Northwestern Defense played good football and kept them out of the end zone. Their pass defense was excellent and they only allowed 2 passes of 20+ yards on the day. Well, how did they keep Ohio State off the board. Let's look at the game plan, see how they played certain situations and where they saw success.

1st, they are primarily a 4-2-5 front and do a great job playing defense with primarily this front. They don't deviated from their 4 hands too much and were very solid in 2020 playing this defense.

1st off they played zone the majority of the game. Every 1st and 2nd down they were in zone coverage.This was very effective in the passing game and helped on the mesh and shallow concepts that Ohio State likes to throw to the intermediate middle of the field.  The only time they went man was a few 3rd downs and in the red zone where they played all man to man. 

Early downs Coverages

vs 11 personnel (1 TE, 3 WR,1 RB)  they got 20 snaps of 11, they played cover 3 15/20 snaps. The other 5 were mostly cover 4 

vs 12 personnel (1RB, 2TE , 2 WR)  2x2. 6/9 snaps were cover 3 with 2 of those being a sam blitz pressure. The other 3 snaps were cover 4.

vs 12 personnel 3x1  formations, 7/10 snaps  were cover 3 weak or strong with 3/10 cover 4 defenses. 

vs trips  11 personnel     8/11 snaps were cover 3 strong and 3/11 snaps they played cover 8(roll the cb down to the 3x1 side and play 1/3 with everyone else). Every coverage check was to the trips side of the formation.

3rd down

3rd and 1-2   cover 4 , 3 weak

3rd and 3.      man free 2/2

3rd and 4-6      man free 1x1

3rd and 7+. 2 hole with a 3 man rush, 2 read. with a 4 man rush , roll (cover8) to the   3x1 ,cover 4 and man free rat with a 5 man rush

Here is a look at some of the coverage on early downs that we discussed above.

1. Cover 3 weak vs 11 personnel

vs 11 cover 3 strong. 

Ohio State comes out with twins to the field with the ball on the left hash. Northwestern goes cover 3 strong. Nice adjustment and coverage.

Vs 12 personnel 2x2 they played a ton of 3 weak to it. Here's an example of it setting the front to the boundary. 

vs 12 personnel 3x1 formations, they went either 3 weak or 3 strong and had success playing it.

vs true trips with the #3 wr split more than 5 yards 

One coverage they played 3 strong and cover 8. They did a nice job with it and it gave Ohio State trouble.

Here they roll to the 3x1 side which helps neutralize the te who Ohio State loves to hit down the middle of the field. The safety is there and the TE has to adjust his route and sits it down. They play man on the 1wr side as they roll to the trips side.

3x1 cb sits and plays flat. SS plays deep 1/3. FS plays middle 1/3

Heres another example of rolling to the 3x1 side.

The RCB squats and the LCB plays deep 1/3, fs middle 1/3 and SS deep 1/3

3rd down

Ohio State was 4/1l, 36%  on 3rd down, which by their standards isn't very good. Northwestern confused them with different looks and did a nice job on 3rd overall.  Below are 2 examples 

3rd and 3 

man to man 5 man pressure/ Blitz to the side of the back. They play man free and get good pressure, Fields just makes a play

film clip

3rd and 10 

cover 2 hole coverage, show pressure but drop 8 and play coverage. Still get great pressure and a bad throw. 

film analysis 

Red zone

They played 2 defenses in the red zone. 

They played all man to man in the red zone 8/8 snaps.  6/8 was cover 0 with three rat underneath defenders. The other 2/8 were cover 0 pressures with the LB's blitzing

cover 0 Rat(3 LBs play zone underneath)

cover o works out well as they do a great job on the blitz. Film below

Both examples discussed above