Cal vs. Northwestern: TD's TD

I've spent a lot of time talking about our offense, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The plays that are called and the success that they have is largely dependant on what the defense is doing, so if you really want to understand the Bear Raid you need to understand the defenses that it faces. In this post we'll look more in depth at quarters coverage (Cover-4), and the way that we were able to break it on Trevor Davis' long TD reception against Northwestern. I think that the commentors got this right on the TV broadcast so the conclusion won't be a surprise, but this post will hopefully give a deeper understanding about why Northwestern was running what they were running, and will let you recognize this kind of thing for yourself when it happens in the future. Also, if you see some of the defensive stuff that I'm about to discuss happening in a game, you'll know what kind of plays we should be calling!

Defending the Bear Raid with Cover-3 Variants

You wouldn't know it from my earlier posts, but defense is my favorite side of the ball. I've focused on offense so far in part because that's what our coach is supposed to be known for, but mostly because I don't hate myself enough to break down last year's defense. Now that I've written some posts on our offensive positions, formations, and the way that our plays are supposed to work, I'm going to start incorporating some more info on defense by looking at interesting things that opposing defenses did to stop us. The goal of these posts is both to teach defense from the ground up, and to show the most interesting strategies that were used against us. This post will look at some basics of a few zone coverages before moving on to a particular Cover-3 variant used by Northwestern.