The ‘Jack’ Backer…

(Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Versatility)

     Discussions on Coach Huey frequently revolve the differences between a 3 man line (3-3, 3-4, whatever) and a 4 man line (4-3, 4-4, etc).  One of the points that is frequently used to tout the benefits of a 4 man line is the fact that you really only need 2 'true' DL to play the DT spots, the DEs can be OLB bodies and still have great effect.  The point is made that in a 3 man line, you need 3 'true' DL to play the DT spots.  For the record, I'm not disagreeing at all.  In fact, I think this is a very good point.
     The development of my approach to the 3-4 has been tempered by my desire to do certain things that I know requires flexibility within your scheme and athletes.  I want to be able to run what I consider to be the "standard" 3-4 fronts: Under, Okie, and Bear.  However, I want to be able to get into a 4 man line with some degree of ease without terribly complicating things for the athletes.  Problem was, I ran into issues with this because of how it conflicted with certain beliefs/preferences I have.
     I don't like using left/right personnel.  Too simple, too exploitable, too passive, any of these and more.  I just do not like the idea in my head.  Plus, it messes with teaching at times.  I don't necessarily like strong/weak personnel because I don't want to get thrown off by teams that are 'tempo to the line', such as my alma mater's current approach of being an up-tempo wing-T (not Gus Malzahn style, but hustling to the huddle, getting the play, and SPRINTING to the line).  I like field/boundary personnel as a compromise between left/right and strong/weak personnel, but there's no shortage of learning involved there.  Teaching the front 5, in particular, to run fronts, stunts, and blitzes from several fronts on both sides of the offense is a load...
     I came to this conclusion during this season after playing a team that was running a no-huddle offense that alternated between full house T and split back 20 personnel by subbing straight from the sidelines to the formation.  I couldn't match their substitutions and get a good call in for the situation.  Luckily, I had a kid playing OLB/DE who could move back to ILB in some situations and play in the interior.  He was passable there, next year he's going to be a fearsome DE if they can't teach him to play ILB better (a position that will ultimately benefit his team more).  That kid knew 2 positions and was smart enough to recognize when to bounce between the two of them.
    I realized that creating a hybrid position, a DE/OLB or warrior/ninja, offered the opportunity to do several things:

• Play field/boundary fronts with personnel that wasn't just left/right
• Play a complementary even front to the standard odd fronts, specifically an "Over" front variation paired with the "Under" front.
• Focus learning into a select position, one that had athletes specifically prepared and chosen for it.

Thus, the concept of the 'Jack' backer arrived into my head.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None...

    Not necessarily. Most offenses will have a certain position that is an essential position to their success. That position will almost always need to be multi-talented and/or cross trained in order to perform that position. Common examples can be H-Back, Tight End, and, most of all these days, Quarterback. Quarterbacks are asked to run, throw, think, and lead. Tight Ends must block and catch, H-Backs must motion, block, catch, all sorts of niches to be filled. Do smart offensive coaches throw inexperienced sophomores into these positions? Not willingly, no.
     A relative of mine is a very successful coach at a school about an hour away and is known for producing 1 outstanding receiver and 1 outstanding QB just about every year. Is he lucky to have some amazing athletes playing for him? Oh brother, you better believe it! But they are also developed well, particularly the receivers. At least one reason why is that there is an unofficial 'apprentice' program within the receiver ranks. As juniors, they play to the QB's blind side and learn the position at the varsity level, develop the skills, and hopefully punish the coverage. As seniors, they line up to the QB's throwing arm and catch lots and lots of passes.
    A friend was successful using a similar philosophy when coaching defensive backs. Juniors typically played corner, seniors typically played safety. For what he was asking the safeties to do in their cover 4 scheme, he needed players who saw the game 'slow down', players who made great reads and understood the checks and adjustments within the defense. Conversely, he joked that his corners started out as 'trained monkeys'. He drilled them and drilled them and drilled them to remove thought or confusion, which helped them slow things down and then allowed them to learn beyond their roles. Because they had played corner as juniors, they moved inside to safety as seniors with an understanding of how the corner position worked within the scheme and therefore had a more thorough understanding of how it all fit together. This 'apprenticeship' wasn't 100% consistent, but it worked out well for him.
     With the concept of the Jack player, the apprentice method can apply in two ways: 1-A player starts at another position and switches to Jack later, or 2-A player develops behind an existing Jack. For the first method, you must have an understanding of what you are looking for in a position. What kind of skill set is necessary to play there, or at the very least what kind of production must you get from that position? For me, this position needs to be able to do 3 things well: 1-Drop into coverage from the 50 front, 2-Pressure from the edge, 3-Play the edge vs the run. #1 and #2 ask for a degree of athleticism and agility, #3 seems to ask for strength and size.
     I would love to have a kid every year who measured in at 6'1, 205 and played like his momma had been insulted by the opposing running backs, but that's not the reality of our profession. Our players change shape and size every year. You can find someone to perform #1-2 fairly easily by looking to your LB and safety positions. But having such a player hold up against the run may be an issue if you don't have a body that is developed enough to take the constant banging on them from offensive tackles. This is where the Jack back and Sam backer tie into one another so well.
     The requirements for each position are close to the same, but the truth is that the Jack requires a more physical player vs an often physically greater opponent. In the Under front and the Over front, he is playing vs an offensive tackle, who will often be larger and more physical than a tight end or fullback (if he's worth a damn, that is).

     The OLB opposite him, the 'Sam' backer, is a position to use to develop players for the 'Jack' spot. More often than not, the Sam will be playing in space against athletes that are more comparable to him. Taking an athletic junior OLB with room to grow and develop and playing him at the Sam spot allows you to prepare someone to move to the Jack spot the next season. With a year of practice under his belt, another year in the weight room, and relevant game experience, he will be ready to move into a position that requires him to play coverage, rush the pass, and play in the trenches.
     By creating such a versatile player, you are then able to create opportunities within your defense to increase variety without necessarily increasing difficulty for MOST of your defense. By installing the Jack Open (Under), Jack Closed (Over), Jack Field/Boundary (Under or Over depending on formation) fronts, you create a lot of variable looks without changing much because of the pre-established versatility of your Jack backer. Consider the following diagram of Jack Field:

     In both diagrams, the Jack is next to a 3 technique and opposite a shaded nose and a 5 technique. In both diagrams the W is reading a guard covered by a 3 technique, the M is reading a guard with a shaded nose, and the S is paired with a 5 technique. The R is on the same side as the J and the W in both and the F is to the TE side in both, reading the same person in both. The run fits are consistent for just about every single position and there was minimal adjustment after the call is made. As soon as the huddle call is made, every player knows where he needs to be and can start to get aligned already, with or without the offense, eliminating problems usually associated with both no-huddle teams and tempo to the line teams.
    While this is delightfully consistent for the defense, for the offense it presents a problem. Is the defense going to align in what appears to be a 4 man front or a 3 man front? Are they going to be set to the field or to the formation? Will they be playing cover 4 from 2 high or 1 high 'robber'? You can be multiple and variable within a scheme like this. But the real benefit is that by taking one position and asking a lot of that single position, you are allowing other positions to have a simpler life. Simple keys, simple assignments = better, faster, more aggressive play.

So… What Should I Do?
    More than anything else, I'm hoping this makes you think a bit. Consider ways to take what you do and what you ask of your players and see if you can't find one position that would better your defense and better your scheme by demanding MORE of them. Maybe it's an ILB that plays as a flexed DL some times, maybe it's a safety that alternates between up high and down low, I don't know. But think about what you could do by taking that player and asking more from them and think about how you can prepare them for that assignment. We all have a 'best player' on our defense, someone that makes things click. What I'm proposing is that perhaps we should be guiding our 'best players' to a specific position, a specific role that can maximize what we want to do.

3-4 Defensive Line Play: Having A Plan

This Is Going To Be Brief...

My intention here isn't so much to detail technique or scheme, but to advocate for planning out your philosophy of what you are going to have your defensive line do. People do any number of crazy things with their schemes and I really do believe that whatever works well for you is what you should be doing, but at the end of the day you'd better fall into one of these categories: Slanting defense who also plays shades, shade defense who also slants, or a two gapping defense who also slants. My intention is to explain why these are the primary philosophies you should be employing and what benefit I think these give you.

Slanting With Shades

Slanting is a popular base technique for the defensive line because of two main reasons: 1-It's easy to teach the technique and 2-Slanting will allow you to play a different kind of athlete on the defensive line than you might normally do. You can put a third string full back on the defensive line and slant him and give him a chance to not only play, but to succeed. Slanting is also something that you can take a kid who's slow to coaching and let him rep it and figure it out to a greater degree than he might be able to in comparison to shade or two gapping (although I think two gapping does have a certain simplicity to it).

Pairing slanting with shade technique is important for the same reasons that a junkball pitcher needs to throw his fastball, lousy though it may be. If you're constantly slanting and moving on the defensive line, the offensive linemen will get used to the idea soon enough and will start expecting the man in front of them to be slanting left or right. When you change that to coming off the ball and playing a shade, it's like a fastball that coming unexpected when all you've been looking at are change ups and curve balls. That 89 mph fastball isn't much, but it's much more effective when the batter isn't looking for it. This lets you make a sub-par player better by giving him the advantage the offense normally has: HE knows where he's going.

Shade With Slants

I like playing shade techniques, I think if you're going to base in a reading front, you should be playing shades most've the time. Playing a shade is a great thing because your kids only need to control half of a man, which is a winnable battle most of the time. The specific technique used is up to individual coaches, I'm of the Pete Jenkins philosophy of defensive line play that declares the most important thing is the hips and hands, followed by the feet, but to each his own.

Continuing the baseball analogy, if slanting is throwing junk balls, then shade with slants is throwing fastballs with an occasional slider. You're turning the game from a guessing game or battle of smarts into a bit more of a execution based match up, where you can get it done or you can't. I'm not saying that shade technique is a boom or bust approach, but I do think that it is more execution based than slanting.

What I like about pairing shades with slanting is that, much like throwing a killer slider takes advantage of your great fastball, by slanting on important downs or unexpected moments you can get a whiff of sorts, where the OL misses his block because it's not happening where it has been the last four or five times.

Two Gapping With Slants

Two gapping is an interesting technique. It is very polarizing amongst the coaching community, most folks will say that you require some kind of Vince Wolfork or Casey Hampton type in order to make it work. I disagree. I think you can get it done with an athlete who can be quick off the ball and play with great leverage, hips and hands. I didn't say much about size or strength there because, from what I've learned of the technique, it's secondary to their get off and their technical ability. Mike Patterson of the Philadelphia Eagles is not a giant of a man, nor is he a weight room savage, however he executes a two gap technique regularly because of his get off and his hands.

Now, as far as pairing two gapping with slants: two gapping is a very aggressive, competitive, downright imposing style. Slanting is the yin to that yang. You go from hitting the offensive linemen in the chest and beating them in the direction they want to go to hauling off and going straight to a gap, which is drastically different in approach, attitude, and responsibility. Switching my analogy to boxing, two gapping is working the body and then slanting to occasionally go for the head. You can soften them up and then choose your moments when you've got them leaning, using that to score big points.

But We Do Something Different!

Good on you! I've never said this is how everyone should be, I'm just advocating my person thoughts. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find better complements within your defensive line play than the three outlined here.

My Favorite Safety Blitz

I like to blitz. I like to blitz a lot. When I call blitzes, I like it when they get results. One blitz that I've consistently gotten results with has been a Safety/ILB blitz that I call "Sabre". I like to run Sabre to the wide side of the field and to the closed side of the formation and I'll do it on just about any down. I'll also run it from the short side of the field on passing downs, but at those moments I'm more likely to run something else instead.

Below: Sabre X (ILB to B, Safety to A)

The rules for Sabre are as follows:

DEs—Slant to C gap
NT—Slant to A gap away from blitz side. I.e. Sabre Field = Slant to short side of field
OLBs—Follow usual alignment rules, play SCF.
ILBs—Blitz side LB = A gap, Off side LB = 3^rd Receiver Hook
Safeties—Blitz side Safety = B Gap on the move, Off side Safety = Middle 1/3^rd
Corners—Deep 1/3^rd.

Additional Tag for Sabre:

X—Crosses the ILB and Safety's blitz.

I got locked out of my team's HUDL accout upon being dismissed, but I'll try to go back and post film of this blitz when I can.

Installing the 3-4: Choosing Your Coverages

But Yer Doin' It Wrong!

Traditional defensive wisdom goes something like this: Choose your front that you're going to stop the run with. From there, choose the coverage that you're going to run. Once you've done that, you can start to think more about techniques. I honestly think this is a very sound and responsible way to approach things and it really does work for the majority of defensive fronts/systems out there. If you're going to be a 4-4 or 3-3 team, you're limited in your coverage options because of how you've committed your players strictly by alignment. Such teams can run Cover 3, Man-Free, and 2-Robber relatively easily, again by alignment. If you're going to be a 4-3 team, you can run 2, 3, 4, man-free, 2 deep man under, you're almost unlimited in your possibilities. However, if you're running a 4-3 and you want to run Cover 3, then you have to work some stuff out, such as cloud or sky coverage, roll strong/weak, etc. This is slightly complex at times. If you're a 46 defense, you'd better be running Man-Free or some variation of Cover 3, such as 3 deep 3 under fire zone.

This works because of how we have set up our understandings of force and contain, pursuit and coverage. If you're playing defense, you need to have players assigned to forcing everything back inside, period. That said, who can perform those roles depends greatly on where they're aligned. A Free Safety cannot align at 12yds deep in the Strong A gap and be responsible for weak force, unless he also wears a cape and has a big red "S" on his chest. I hope I don't need to make more examples of this.

Because we choose our front first, we are dedicating a certain number of people to certain alignments, thereby limiting the number of possible assignments. If we commit 8 players to the box with our front, we cannot have 2 safeties. If we only have 7 in the box, then we must have 2 safeties. Recognizing this allows us to have a better understanding of how coverages fit into defensive structures.

And Here's Where I Contradict Myself…

I really, truly believe that for a person implementing a 3-4 scheme, choosing the coverage first is crucial. The 3-4 has a lot of moving parts, more so than just about any other defense, and often has changing responsibilities with regards to force, contain, spill, all those terms we love to use to define good defense. The difference between the 3-4 and other defenses, in my experience, is that the 3-4 has the interesting feature that the front and the coverage are intertwined. If you want to run a certain coverage, you need to do certain things with your front. There is a minor assumption that is working behind all of this: you want to rush at least 4. If you don't mind rushing 3 and dropping 8, well, no biggie. But if you're going to rush 4 in the 3-4, you need to marry the front and the coverage. You have to make a conscious decision about what you're doing.

Huh?

The 3-4 is a seven man front to start. The actual front alignment varies quite a bit, with some teams preferring a 4-0-4 head up approach with slanting and stunting, and others preferring an 'under' front variation (9-5-1-3-5), and yet others running a 3-0-3 double eagle front. That's fairly irrelevant at this exact moment. What is important is how you're going to run your coverage, specifically what your base is. It comes down to this: are you going to be an even coverage base or an odd coverage base? Are you going to run Cover 3, Cover 1 (Man Free) and Cover 9 (3x3 fire zone) or are you going to run Cover 2, 4, and 6 (¼ ¼ ½)? Answering this question is the biggest step towards developing a common sense, fundamentally sound 3-4 scheme.

If you're going to run Cover 3, then you need to blitz someone (an LB most likely) and probably replace them with a DB. Who the someone is doesn't matter, you need to blitz someone to send 4 and drop 7. If you blitz an OLB, then the safety on that side should replace him in coverage, presumably with the Curl/Flat responsibility. If you blitz an ILB, probably same solution, except now it's Hook/Curl. You can just straight up send a safety and everyone else drops, if you really want.

If you're going to run Cover 2, then you need to blitz someone away from the passing strength or wide side of the field. Now you don't want to blitz your corners in C.2, they have a pretty important responsibility, so that's out. Similarly, you want to keep your safeties deep, so they can't blitz. Therefore, it's one of your ILBs. The reason why I say away from passing strength is that the three interior drops in Cover 2 usually go Hook/Curl, Middle Hole, Hook/Curl. Because of that, you generally want more people dropping to the passing strength because you want to have numbers to the passing strength.

I don't think I get it…

No worries, it's a complicated concept and one that is unusual. The 3-4 is a complicated and unusual defense these days and I really believe that if you sit down and marinate on what I'm talking about, you'll notice there's a certain logic within that makes it sort of an 'Ah-ha!' realization. I stumbled on the importance of this while implementing our 3-4 two years ago. I was reading a thread on Huey where someone mentioned the approach mentioned in my intro and I realized that it didn't work that way for the 3-4. After that, I began to think on it more and more and I feel like I've got a good grip on the mechanics of it all.

For more reading, I really recommend hitting up my scribd account and looking at some of the playbooks there. There's a neat synergy between the front and the coverage and how it all just… works.

Teaching Formations Follow-Up/Example: 3-4 Adjustments

Kind of A Re-Hash, But Whatever...

I wanted to follow up on an older post with some specific examples of how it can all work together. I'll let the pictures do the talking and try to post the PPT slides for downloading if you want.

Real Quick Note:

With the 3-4, most've your adjustments will happen with safeties and OLBs. I make it a point to try to divorce the interior 5 (DL and ILBs) from the adjustors (OLBs and safeties) and both from the trained monkeys (CBs). Corners are beautiful, fragile creatures, but we never want them thinking. Ever.

If you're a 4-4 team, most of your adjustments will happen with your OLBs and FS. Same for 3-3 teams. 4-3 teams can adjust in a variety of ways, depends on the philosophy and coverage of the DC.

OLBs:

Safeties:

Putting Them Together:

Scribd Link:

Alignments PPT

Wrap-Up

Hopefully this offers some insight into how I want to approach formations and their variants, as well as help you consider how you can teach a consistent set of rules and alignments so that there's zero confusion for your kids. Also, helps a great deal with disguising if you ALWAYS align the same way.