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News: Suh/Fairley against the Giants poo poo stain interior OL Views: Bet the under
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Sep 1, 2014 18:44
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:42 |
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so it was 1:30 am and I'm up with a summer flu and watching the Packer/Seahawk game on Game Rewind since I need my football fix and my lovely team doesn't play til Monday. Decided I'd do a mini breakdown of some of what seattle's defense does since I've seen a lot of people asking why Rodgers didn't try and force throws at Sherman, and how Seattle just plays defense in general. I did a few of these last year and they go pretty quickly so if people like them I can do more. So here are some low res game rewind coaches film pictures of how Seattle tends to play defense and what the Packers did to try and counter it.  From Seattle's POV, this is what I'd call their base defensive alignment. How it differs from your average NFL defense is that Kam Chancellor plays in the box as an 8th man a solid 90% of non-goal line snaps. Even against 3 WR personnel as you see here. It allows Seattle to have an advantage at stopping quick inside runs while weakening their pass defense a bit. But they trust their outside corners Sherman and Maxwell enough to run this as their basic look. As most people know, Sherman lines up on the defense's left side exclusively in most of their games. You can only really run two types of defense out of this alignment, which would be - Cover 1 Robber - man defense across the board with a linebacker (or Chancellor) in a shallow zone/QB spy over the middle. Earl Thomas generally plays the middle of the field, although he does cheat away from Sherman's side or just align away from Sherman a fair amount.  or Cover 3 - a straight zone across the board where Chancellor gets an easy coverage responsibility near the LOS, while Earl Thomas basically chills in centerfield all game. Madden players will be familiar with the zone colorings I use, where teal = flat coverage (or curl to flat, a slightly deeper version to take away curl routes), yellow = hook zones in the middle/deep middle, dark blue = deep portion of the field  You can always throw in wrinkles to these two looks, but they'll be the base of what Seattle does most of the time, and a solid 90+% of this game against the Packers. Their front 4 generated enough pressure against the Packers' poo poo line that they ran next to no blitzes and played these generic coverages all game. The play above would look like man coverage to Rodgers' pre-snap because the corners, particularly the slot corner, are so tight in coverage. One counter to this type of aggressive man coverage is to run pick plays. The Packers' did that to an extent with a quick screen to Jordy Nelson at the bottom of the screen, but Rodgers misfired. I feel like I have enough pictures in this one so I'm not gonna go through that whole play. So pick plays would be one to way to beat bump and run man coverage. The Packers ran a few of them, but the Seahawks didn't play up at the line all too often. Another strategy is to avoid the Seahawks' top 2 corners altogether. The Packers are fortunate enough to have a legit slot WR in Randall Cobb and Mike McCarthy uses him well. Here's a formation the Packers went to very often as the game progressed:  Trips to the side away from Sherman, basically flooding that side of the field. side note: look at those DL splits, they put the wide 9 to shame. Randall Cobb is the third man in, aligned across from Kam Chancellor here  This formation forces the Seahawks to either 1) Declare they are in man coverage by moving one of their top 2 corners off the outside of the field to the inside to account for Cobb, which gives Rodgers an advantage pre-snap 2) Give Rodgers a pretty good inkling that they're playing cover 3 or a cover 3 variant as described earlier 3) Bite the bullet and play man across the board with Kam Chancellor vs. Randall Cobb, a very, very large advantage for the Packers. They could also incorporate a bracket coverage, where Chancellor and Wagner would essentially double team Cobb with Chancellor taking away the sideline and Wagner the middle of the field. The Seahawks don't give Chancellor challenging matchups however, so this is very unlikely. It winds up being #2, as you could probably guess. McCarthy has a pretty good idea of how Seattle will play this. The Seahawks' defensive call is as follows  and the Packers run a play that many Madden players will recognize, commonly referred to as 4 verticals. It's a play that many people abuse (maybe myself once or twice in the past) because it ruins zone coverages that don't have 4+ people deep. Here are the routes:  if you can visualize the play developing (because I can't make gifs) you can kinda see how the biggest responsibility of coverage for this play now shifts to Earl Thomas in the middle of the field. His deep middle zone is now being threatened by two people. Bobby Wagner (LB) in a hook zone now is also forced to try and run with Randall Cobb.  You can see the dilemma Thomas is put in. The WR to his right is well inside the deep third corner (the only other play on the field who could make a play on him besides Thomas) while Cobb is sprinting toward the opposite pylon being covered by a linebacker. Thomas plays it as well as he can by splitting the difference between the two and waiting til Rodgers makes his decision. But the fact that Rodgers was forced to roll to his right makes the decision for him and he went at Cobb. Wagner runs with Cobb for 45 yards but eventually gets beaten and basically tackles him, drawing flags from two referees for a 45 yard pass interference call. Like I said earlier, the Packers went back to this look a few times. They ran the exact same 4 verticals play the next quarter with Cobb aligning in the middle of the trips receivers, where he was the target again and gained ~25 yards. So people may still question why Rodgers avoided Sherman the entire night. And you can see that Sherman rarely had help. But the Packers had their ideas on how to attack the Seahawks' secondary without involving Sherman, and I think if their line held up, would have had a decent shot. Every Seahawks corner beyond their top 2 was beaten quite a bit. But most of the time, Rodgers was lying face down by the time he could've seen it. Some teams, like the Gilbride-led Giants, would see pictures like this and call for isolation routes and jump balls to people like Hakeem Nicks all game. It doesn't work very well.  But I think the Packers' strategy was a lot better. They just need guys like Bulaga to stay healthy for it to work. Iodised QQ fucked around with this message at 07:44 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 07:41
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Glad some people enjoyed it. I didn't watch a ton of game rewind as the season went on last year because I was too emo over the Giants' season, but now that I don't have much in the way of expectations for them I should be checking it out more this year. So if I have some free time/see stuff that people want covered I could do some more of those kinda breakdowns.
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Sep 7, 2014 17:46
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Blotto Skorzany posted:Just a heads up, I think your analysis compares favorably to stuff people are getting paid for. Thanks, although I don't think I have quite as deep an understanding (esp with some terminology) as some of these guys, I just really like the strategy of football a lot. Though it was pretty cool that your link has the guy break down one of the exact plays I did. I should have some free time tomorrow to kick back and watch some game rewind so I'll have something for the week 2 thread.
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Sep 10, 2014 18:03
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