Pick Plays and Cover-0: Caleb Coleman's 4th Down Stop

Every season there's some hot-button issue that gets the pundits talking. This year, for a stretch after the controversial finish to Notre Dame-FSU, that issue was the pick play. A little closer to home, a similar play gave Utah the victory over USC in the last minutes of that game. These are plays that everybody runs. Everyone complains about them when they're used against their team, and nobody notices them when their own team runs them. Until someone institutes a rule that no two receivers can pass within X yards of each other, these plays will have a legitimate place in football strategy, and that's OK. Although picks capitalize on a certain amount of “interference,” defenses have plenty of answers that can render them ineffective. Like every other play, it's about the coordinator having a sense for when these plays are coming, and making the right call to stop them. This post will break down three key plays involving picks from the OSU game in an effort to get inside the game-within-the-game behind compressed formations (formations where two or more receivers line up tight to each other). The ultimate point will be to understand Caleb Coleman's game-sealing tackle late in the game on 4^th and 2.

The most egregious kinds of picks happen when a defense is playing zone coverage. In a zone coverage, defenders are covering parts of the field instead of specific players. For example, the short outside zone is called the flat. Every zone coverage will have a player responsible for covering that area. In most coverages the defender responsible for the flat won't start out there:

In this diagram, the nickelback (N) is the flat player to the left of the diagram. He lines up over the second WR from the outside, and only expands farther outside to the flat if a receiver takes him there. A pick play can really mess this system up:

  

 Here we can see that if one receiver picks the nickelback, he'll be unable to expand to the flat to cover the TE (Y), meaning that the defense is left without a flat defender.

The play diagramed above is an actual play from the OSU game. It was 3^rd and 10 with 14:09 to go in the game, and Mannion hit the TE in the flat for a 15 yard first down. Caleb Coleman (#10) was the nickelback who got picked, and the Beavs went on to score a go-ahead TD later in the same drive:

Cover-0

As we'll see in a minute, that was only the first of several key fourth quarter plays defined by picks, with some being run by us and some being run by them. Cover-0 is another key concept for understanding the final quarter's big moments. Cover-0 is a man coverage with no safety help. If you're in a nickel package, this means that all of your DB's are one-on-one with a receiver:

 You can recognize Cover-0 in part because the safeties will play at a shallower depth. They aren't worried about getting over the top of any other receivers, they're only worried about getting tight coverage on the one guy that they're responsible for, so they won't play at their usual 10-12 yard depth. All of the DB's will also be more squared up to their man, and looking at him more than the QB. As it probably sounds, man coverage with no safety help is risky and has the potential to give up big plays, so you're usually going to use Cover-0 to bring as many pass rushers as possible. Cover-0 gives you the potential to outnumber the offense's blockers (we'll see an example in a minute). This ability to outnumber the offense's blockers also makes Cover-0 popular against the run at the goal line, where every rushing yard is especially valuable and there's less risk of defenders getting beat over the top (since there's simply not space). We were running this coverage to generate pressure on 2^nd and 6 with 5:08 to go in the game:

 

OSU is in an empty formation, so we have five DB's covering their five eligible receivers. This leaves the remaining six defenders to rush the passer. Because OSU is empty they're limited to a 5-man protection (the five OL), meaning that we have a free rusher. The LT takes the LB, as he should. If he has two rushers over him he has to take the inside most threat, because that rusher has the shortest path to the QB. This leaves the DE, Johnson, unblocked off the edge.

Defending the Pick Play with Man Coverage

As a man coverage, Cover-0 is vulnerable to the pick play in a different way from the zone coverage we saw above. Against the zone coverage, we saw that a receiver who wasn't going to get the ball blocked the defender responsible for covering the receiver who did get the ball. Man coverage is  different, especially when the defender is pressing:

This diagram comes from a play that we ran on our final TD drive:

 First, the pick: Treggs (H) runs a very shallow slant with Anderson (Y) rubbing underneath him and catching the pass. The Beavers are playing Cover-0 and bringing a blitz, but fortunately we've rolled Goff out of the pocket. Against this coverage, Treggs isn't picking the guy that's covering Anderson. Instead, he's just running into his own defender and creating a barrier, forcing the guy that is covering Anderson to run around that barrier. It's hard to call a penalty here because the SS in the diagram wants to make contact with Treggs. He's seeking Treggs out to press him just as much as Treggs is seeking him out to pick him. Do you call Treggs for offensive PI when the guy he's picking is also trying to initiate contact with him? How can you tell a guy who's failed to get off a jam from a guy who's running a pick? This situation rarely results in a penalty unless the pick player does something extra like shoving his defender into the guy that's covering Anderson. If this were a zone coverage, on the other hand, then the SS would probably be responsible for Anderson in the flat and would probably not be trying to contact Treggs in the first place, making the pick look worse and more liable to be penalized. This leads to the strange conclusion that a play is or isn't an illegal pick based on the coverage that the defense is in. Obviously that's not how it really works; the refs have a hard enough time as it is, we don't need them breaking down coverages in addition. The point is that a pick against a zone coverage is going to cause much more obvious interference, while a pick against man can almost not look like a pick at all.

This all brings us to 4^thand 2 with 4:03 left in the game. OSU has just crossed the 50 with us leading by 6. If they get a conversion here, we're at serious risk of giving up a TD. OSU isn't quite in an empty formation this time, but just before the snap they motion their RB out so that they might as well be. Remember that one way to recognize Cover-0 is by the shallow depth of the safeties, and in this video you'll see that none of our defenders is deeper than six yards.

 This is what the Beavers wanted to happen, and what should happen against man coverage.  I've indicated the man assignments here with dotted lines, so the N is responsible for H while the FS is responsible for the RB.  H moves inside to pick the safety (McClure).  The nickleback, being responsible for H in man coverage, moves inside with him.  This should create a whole mess of interference to spring the RB in the flat.

Fortunately for Bear fans, that's not what happened. Why not? There are multiple ways to play man coverage, especially when you're defending compressed or bunched receivers. In the last play discussed (Anderson's long reception), we saw that OSU's defense played straight-up man, with each defender locked onto their guy no matter where he went. This is desirable because it lets the defense get a jam and disrupt the route on short passes like slants and hitches, both of which are quick, easy throws in short yardage situations. As we've seen, however, playing straight-up man-press can cause problems when a man defender is forced to chase his receiver through traffic. A different way to play man coverage is with a “Banjo” technique. This just means that one defender lines up inside of the compressed receivers while another lines up outside of them. The inside defender takes the first receiver inside, whoever that happens to be, and the outside defender takes the first receiver outside, whoever that happens to be:

This is still a man coverage, but the defenders sort out who they're covering after the routes distribute instead of before the snap. This way, if the receivers cross or run a rub, the defenders aren't chasing and getting caught in the wash. Getting back to the video, the inside WR heads inside and picks McClure, but it doesn't matter, because in the Banjo technique McClure is no longer responsible for the RB once he breaks outside. McClure absorbs the picking player, Coleman is left completely free to cover the RB breaking outside, and we get the stop that seals the game:

Banjoing this formation isn't a cure-all. As with any coverage, it has its own weaknesses. If OSU would've called a different rub play, they probably would've converted:

If they'd run something like this, the Banjo wouldn't have worked.  The inside receiver would've gone deep, forcing McClure to carry him.  When the outside receiver broke in on the slant, Coleman would've had bad leverage for making a play on the ball.  As with all pass plays, specific pick plays work best against specific coverages and coverage techniques. It's up to your DC to gameplan well and to communicate to his players the kinds of formations, downs, and distances where a pick is likely to show up. He also needs to know what kinds of picks the opponent likes to run and, if they run several, under which conditions they use each one, so that he can have his players in the ideal adjustments. 

Compressed formations with multiple receivers lined up close to each other are their own, very sophisticated part of the game. If you were to get a Ph.D. in football strategy, you'd probably take a seminar in bunch formations. These formations are already the subject of a book-length treatment (Coverdale and Robinson's “The Bunch Attack: Using Compressed, Condensed Formations in the Passing Game,” one of the best football books on the market right now). So, the next time you see one of these plays and everyone haggles over whether or not it's “cheap,” you can take in the strategy behind it and figure out what coverage adjustment would've taken care of the play in question. And finally, in the context of the OSU game, you can be glad that when the game was on the line, our guy did a better job at calling this phase than their guy did.

Discussion thread here: http://bearinsider.com/forums/showthread.php?88323-Bear-Raid-Breakdown-%28Late-OSU-Edition%29-Coleman-s-4th-and-2-Stop&p=842401920#post842401920