Do Steelers Have a Defense Scheme Fix? | Steelers Morning Rush

Do Steelers Have a Defense Scheme Fix? | Steelers Morning Rush

Hey folks, good morning and welcome to another episode of Steelers Morning Rush. I’m Alan Saunders. My apologies for the lack of a show. Yesterday was a little bit uh under the weather. We will have one for you today. We will not have a morning rush next week as I’m going on vacation. Uh the afternoon drive will be in good hands with Smitty and a series of uh co-hosts. Uh Aaron Becker will be there. Uh Brennan How will be there and our buddy Joe Morrison will be making his first appearance on the channel as well. So, a bunch of uh my gang from steelersow.com and DB of course will be on the afternoon drive tonight and on next Friday. I will not be in the afternoon tonight because Chris Carter is getting married. So, uh congratulations to Chris and Tiana. And uh we’ll be uh we’ll be there tonight. So, no me on the afternoon drive. Today is a long promised episode that I’ve been working on and Randy Tobias called me out the other day and I was like, “Okay, I didn’t give him an episode yesterday. I really owe him a good one today. Here we go. We’re going to talk about cover four quarters and why I think the Steelers are going to use more of it this year. Um, cover four is a defense is a zone defense that gets that allows more players up to the line of scrimmage than cover two does. It’s better against a run than cover two is, but also still provides some of the benefits against the pass of cover two. And uh so we’re going to start by talking about the Steelers base uh defense, which is cover three nickel. And um we’re going to get it up on the whiteboard here. We haven’t had the whiteboard out in a long time. So this is our our lowfi sort of technique. Here we go. So this is the Steelers uh get the spotlight glare out of there for you. Um, this is the Steelers base defense. Okay, you have Wow, I’m really struggling with this today. Uh, you have four down linemen, you have two linebackers, you have a nickel, a strong safety, two corners, and a free safety. Um, so this is what they play most of the time. And you can see, we get this going. There we go. That looks better in cover three against, you know, a normal looking alignment. There’s a slot. There’s your line. There’s a tight end. Quarterback, running back. Okay. So, in cover three, your corner has what’s called a deep third. Your corner has a deep third and the safety as deep third. Okay. The corner has to be deep as the deepest, wide is the widest. So he takes the deeps out here. The nickel and the strong safety play the number TW’s and the flats. So if one of these guys goes short and one goes long, it doesn’t matter which. The nickel and the strong safety take the short and the corners take the long. If they both go long, the corners take the deepest guy and the nickel and the strong safety take the underneath guy. with both linebackers in zones here for the tight end and the running back in the middle of the field. So if they run like a wheel concept, this slot comes and runs a post and the back runs a wheel. The nickel needs to pass the slot to the linebacker and then gets the flat. That’s cover three. Um it’s the Steelers base defense. It’s not very good against the pass. It works. Uh, but it’s very easy to beat. It’s very easy to stress. Uh, especially in areas like I just described. You do things like throw a tight end out on the boundary. Uh, you know, run a bunch of crossing routes in here and now all of a sudden you’ve got corners against tight ends and you’ve got wide receivers against linebackers. How many times you watch the Pittsburgh Steelers over the years and be like, why is a wide receiver on a linebacker? Well, it’s just what I just showed you, right? In cover three again, here’s a post, there’s a linebacker, here’s a wheel, there’s a go. This is not a a complicated route combination, but cover three makes the corner go this way, the nickel to the flat, and now the linebacker’s left with this slot receiver. So, there goes Jarvis Landry up the post against the Cleveland Browns in the playoffs. Right. Cover four is different. even though you use the exact same personnel, you have the exact same personnel on the group and the field. And um importantly, you can have them just as close to the line of scope. See the the reason that cover two the Steelers don’t like cover two is to play cover two, you have to have your safeties way off the ball. So cover two eliminates the ability of playing that eighth man in the box. Okay? It’s really hard for a strong sa in cover two. Strong safety, free safety, both have deep halves with the wide receiver. The corner is going to pass this wide receiver to the safety. If he goes deep, so you can’t have Deshaawn Elliot down here and then ask him to be running with CD Lamb up there. That’s not going to work, right? So, you have to be up to play cover two. But cover four is different. Quarters cover four and quarters are the same thing. They’re they’re just different words for the same defense. In quarters, this the corners get the outside guy deep just like in cover three. No matter what that outside receiver does, unless it’s a crossing route and a switch, it’s going to be the corner. Okay? And then the free safety and the strong safety work one work two to one here, two to one here. So, and then you have your nickel and your three linebackers in zone. So, the nickel gets the flat here, the linebacker gets the flat on this side, and this middle linebacker hangs out in the middle of the field. So, if this slot receiver is going to leave the flat, then he becomes the safety’s responsibility. If this tight end is going to leave the flat, then he becomes the safety responsibility. If the slot or the tight end doesn’t leave the flat, now you have deep help for your corner. So on our on our route that was confusing the Steelers before, corner goes deep, slot receiver rides a post, the safety’s going to come down on that post and the nickel can still get here because the safety is not in the middle of the field anymore. Now the safety’s over here. Same thing here with with Elliot. He can run up the post with a a tight end or he can help double the outside receiver or he he can pass, you know, to the middle of the field. Let’s let’s say the tight end runs runs an in. He can pass tight in the middle of the field and go the back coming out of the back field. So you have the same personnel basically as you have in cover three work for quarters. The only difference is there’s a linebacker in the middle of the field, so you kind of give away what you’re doing. Um, but I do think it prevents a lot of the communi they’re not communication problems necessarily. It prevents a lot of the mismatches that you can exploit against cover three. It’s a Now there there is one thing that quarters really struggles with and that’s when you put three or even four guys on the same side of the field and there are a lot of complicated checks that you have to make to decide how you’re going to cover this. Are you going to travel a corner or are you going to run something like mini or something over here? There are like a bunch of different ways to deal with that. But against balanced formations, uh, quarters is a really good defense. This is something that Vic Fangio ran all the time, still runs all the time. And Darius Slay is very familiar with that defense. And I think it’s not a coincidence that they got him. And I think they want to do some more of that. I think it’s a defense that is better suited to the modern NFL than the cover three they’ve always run. And I think it’s just as good against the run as their cover three is. Pat Narduzi at pit absolutely loves quarters. He runs 90% quarters on first and second down, maybe more. Um, and he does it because it stops the run. Now, he’s also like insane and won’t use a nickel. He just runs base defense against any personnel pretty much. So, his is a little harder to pull off, but I think using NFL personnel groupings, quarters can be a really effective defense. We’ve seen the Buffalo Bills use it a ton. Um, and I think it fits the skill set of their corners. I think it fits the skill set of Porter. I think it fits the skill set of Slay. I think Ramsay in that nickel role in in a quarter defense really really good. So I think that’s something that can be a fix to some of the communication problems from last year and also just some of the mismatch problems we’ve seen the Steelers defense run into over the years. And I do expect them to use more of it this season. All right, that’s all I got for today. And not only today, that’s all I got for an entire week. uh you’re not going to see me here. I may I may jump in on an episode just a troll from the beach because that’s that’s who I am and that’s how I roll. But uh otherwise, you’re in the good hands of Smitty and the gang from here on out. See you guys on the other side of vacation for a big week leading up to training camp. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Until next time, enjoy.

Welcome to Steelers Morning Rush, our new daily short-form podcast with Alan Saunders, giving a longer perspective on a single news topic surrounding the Pittsburgh Steelers or the National Football League. Today, it’s the Steelers’ defensive coverage options in the secondary and how a change in the type of zone defense they call could be beneficial.

The Steelers have always been a team that primarily runs Cover 3, prioritizing stopping the run over softer zone coverages like Cover 2. But there is another option that is becoming more popular around the NFL that could be a fit for the Steelers, and that’s Cover 4 or quarters.

Alan breaks it down. #steelers #herewego #nfl

CONNECT WITH STEELERS NOW:
Steelers Now: https://steelersnow.com
SN on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pghsteelersnow
SN on FB: https://facebook.com/steelersnow
SN on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/pghsteelersnow/