PrepntheSep":1awt3j62 said:
I rewatched the entire season and one thing that I came away from watching it was our weakness at covering tightends and backs. Wright and Wagner are both emerging stars and this isn't a bashing post but I couldn't help but notice the continuous completions to tightends and backs in the middle of the field. Not just normal plays either, crucial downs in big games. Heck the Niners went down the field by throwing to Gore multiple times before hitting Walker for the winning touchdown in SF. Detroit had similar plays at the end of their game wining drive. I'm curious if others noticed this as well? Wagner is super athletic so I think with experience he could become more adept to reading zones better but I'm less sure of Wright. I just imagine if they could cover like Willis and Bowman how destructive and constricting our defense could be. I did note that our lbs dropped deep in their zones allowing a lot of underneath completions, is this the coaching or players? Just curious what others thought
A big part of Pete's philosophy on D is keeping things in front of you and not giving up the big play. That said, we run a lot of Cover 3 and Man with either single high or sometimes two high. The cover 2 variety I often saw us run last year when we did go cover 2 was of the Tampa 2 variety of cover 2. We do run a lot of variants of cover 3 though. MLB will often have a short zone along with either one of the other two LBs depending on offensive strong side or sometimes even a safety. A safety can also sometimes have the flat as well. You have 3 deep. This means that underneath the high safety that there are only two defenders covering A LOT of space. Offenses like to be aggressive and get downfield, but we seek to mitigate the big play and make teams throw against the softer zones underneath. That Tampa 2 I was talking about earlier means that in that style of cover 2 the MLB is getting very deep drops to help cover the gap between the two high safeties leaving only the two OLBs to cover underneath. Again, this is a softer zone underneath vs the standard cover 2 style where the MLB stays up in a shorter zone with the other two LBs making it harder for those short passes to be completed.
I generally find that the smarter, more experienced QBs we face will be patient and methodical and try to cut up those zones underneath (this is the norm around the league), but you don't see teams really completing a lot of passes against us in man. The natural reaction is to ask why we don't run more man, but you have to have good mixture. Man has it's weaknesses as well, such as the "rub" routes that NE tended to run against us that are either blatant or natural pic plays.
Anyway, if you really break it down and look throughout the league, even with the large areas our LBs have to cover in the shorter areas, those two are very good in coverage and you'll even find that to be true statistically.
Where you went really wrong though....is your assumption (and likely following suite) that Willis and Bowman are some pedestal and I fart in your general direction. Bowman is the real LB between those two. A lot like Wagner. Willis is the pretty boy who's been overrated since his very nice rookie campaign (albeit still very good player). Willis has the luxury of playing next to Bowman's physicality at the LOS.
