DISGUISING YOUR DEFENSIVE SETS is a fantastic way to confuse the offense and force your opponent into costly mistakes.
You can use it to bait an offense to attack a perceived weakness of your team, which eventually leads them to playing into your squad’s strength.
Your players’ first priority is to know and execute their roles in the standard fronts and coverages within your defensive set. However, once they are comfortable in these roles, you can disguise your sets to make your defense multidimensional and unpredictable.
You’ll need to get your players to buy into this type of defensive philosophy to show them how effective it can be. Use game film to show them how just a slight change prior to the snap enables your team to gain a huge advantage.
Don’t make your defensive disguises an afterthought or something that you only practice when you have a spare 5 or 10 minutes. Drill your players during every practice session and coach the concept of disguising defenses as if it’s often the difference between winning and losing.
Disguising Advantages
Implementing a strategy of changing your defensive sets prior to the snap offers several advantages.
O Reduces the offense’s level of play execution.
O Creates confusion, mental errors and indecision regarding offensive play calling.
O Places the game in the hands of the QB on the field rather than in the hands of the coaches on the sideline and in the press box.
O Causes indecision of the offense’s coverage reads after the snap.
O Confuses offensive line calls and blocking assignments – no one knows who to block.
O Forces receivers to run routes that they may not want to against your defensive set.
O Makes it much more difficult for the QB to pick up hot reads and blitz reads.
O Makes automatic calls more complicated for the offense. For example, a fade may be the proper call against your initial defense, but once you switch, a fade may be the last route that the offense wants to run.
O Solidifies match-ups.
Disadvantages To Disguising
As with any great defensive philosophy, there are disadvantages to consider along with the benefits.
O Your players need to have an incredible understanding of offensive football so that they know why disguising works and what the offense might do to adjust.
O Adds to the number of adjustments you have to teach. Instead of just the adjustments from a normal defensive set, you must show your defensive players what they should do to adjust out of a disguised defense.
O Adds to the number of techniques you have to teach.
O Uses valuable practice time to properly go through the techniques and to drill the players. You need to decide if the time invested is worth it.
The problem with many coaches is that if they have a talented defensive unit, they don’t attempt to create confusion for the offense. Simply trying to overmatch your opponent athletically isn’t going to carry you throughout the season.
All the offense needs is a smart, experienced quarterback who recognizes your defensive coverages and picks them apart. Adding disguises takes away his initial read and buys your defensive linemen more time to get into the backfield.
Using Disguises
Before installing a variety of complex disguises, you need to figure out what you want to accomplish and how to use these changing sets. Some coaches want a simple addition they can switch to a few times during a game while others use disguises as an integral part of their defensive scheme.
Keep in mind, a disguise doesn’t have to be a complete overhaul of your defensive set during the QB’s presnap read. You can be static with your defensive fronts and move around your coverages or vice versa. Don’t think that you need an elaborate scheme to utilize defensive disguises.
The following are several tactical changes you can make to disguise your defense.
O Disguise Fronts. To create indecision on the offensive front, your defense can mix a combination of alignments, stems (changes) and pressure looks.
You can show one front, wait for the offense to signal the play and line calls, then stem to another front. The limitations of how far you can effectively move your defensive linemen doesn’t allow these changes to be radical movements. Moving your linemen too far in or too far out allows the offense to make an easy switch to run the play into your weakness. However, combining front stems with pressure, especially line stunts, really pushes an offensive line back on its heels.
O Disguise Pressure Threats. Don’t try to disguise a pressure threat that you would never use during a game. The most effective disguises come from a set that you normally run, so the offense doesn’t know something is different.
One type of press threat is to blitz from a base alignment and hope that the element of surprise throws off the offense. The downside is that it takes longer for these pressures to develop, which could give the offense enough time to adjust.
Another kind of press threat is to show or stem to pressure. Anytime you show a pressure look, your coverage men need to be aligned in a position that is conducive to covering their receivers.
No matter what look you go to or start from, you need to have more than one blitz out of these looks. If you only present two defensive calls from one of your pressure alignments, the offense eventually figures you out and schemes to counter your pressure.
When your squad has mastered the concept of pressuring from a base alignment and pressuring from a blitz look — have them combine both looks. This requires more game planning and practice but presents a constant pressure threat to the offense.
O Disguising Coverages. The alignment of your cover men is critical when it comes to disguising your coverages in the secondary. Keep in mind that you must play the look you show every so often to keep the offense guessing. If you continually show one coverage but never use it, the offense knows something is up when you line up in that formation.
Hiding the true coverage can be done in two ways. One is simply showing a particular contour, then switching to an unexpected coverage. The other is to play a flat, or four-across look, which is more of a pressure look. However, be aware that in this set you’re showing your run support, which is something that you need to consider during typical running downs.
The flat look is unique because the players are so far off the ball that they can do some special things. They can get into individual stems by changing their alignment or they can yo-yo their alignment (show one look, then come back to original look). Most QBs are taught to read the secondary first, then concentrate on the defensive front. By constantly switching, the QB’s presnap read won’t match up with the defense you’re running. The QB’s confidence in his presnap read dissipates and your defense has gained an advantage.
Reacting To An Offense’s Look, Motion
While you can disguise your defense during any play of the game, some situations allow it to work better than others. For example, if the offense comes out in a 2-tight-end, 2-RB set, the defense is packed in but it presents the opportunity to give the offense a greater number of looks. However, when facing an empty formation, your choices for disguise are limited because your defenders are spread out and can’t easily move to another area or player responsibility.
Your defense also needs to react to the offense if it puts a man in motion. If the TE goes in motion from one side of the line to the other, this creates a problem for your front stem because there’s a change of strength at the LOS. You’ll either have to live with the stem you made or call off the change and adjust to the strength the offensive linemen created.
When the RB shifts, it’s generally less of a problem because strength is not changed. The problem the defense encounters is being outnumbered on one side of the field but this usually can be handled by adjusting a LB to the area.
If the RB motions out of the backfield to become a receiver, there are two ways to handle it. You can react with a secondary player, which may alert the offense to your disguised coverage. Or, if you’re facing a QB with a strong arm and want to lock in your coverage call, run a LB with the RB.
What To Consider
Game situations constitute when to use defensive disguises. While they can be used at any point of the game, consider these factors before you hop into a defensive disguise:
- Time left in the game. Particularly the final 2 minutes of the first half and final 4 minutes of the game.
- Vertical field position. You’ll want to use different disguises in different areas of the field.
- Weather, field conditions. This may be a factor if the footing is treacherous.
- Down and distance.
- Score.
Offensive Counters
A good offensive coach teaches his squad to pick up what the defense is doing prior to the snap. The more it can pick up, the more successful it can be.
While the defense is trying to hide its fronts and coverages, a good player on offense has an understanding of the potential responsibility of your defenders based on their initial alignments.
The following items shows the four ways that offenses try to counteract a defensive disguise.
1. Personnel. Using multiple personnel packages with continuous substitutions forces the defense to worry more about matching up with the proper players and less on disguising the defensive set.
By substituting, the offense tries to get the defense to substitute, which shakes up the defensive personnel. If the defensive unit on the field isn’t used to playing together, then they certainly didn’t get enough time in practice to work on their defensive disguises.
2. Formations. Changing formations, especially ones that present a horizontal stretch, is used to get the defense to tip its intention.
Against defenses that like to overload or show unbalanced looks, an offense often goes into a balanced set. By balancing its set, the offense forces the defense to either adjust or let the offense exploit the presented weakness.
3. Motion. Moving the TE from one end of the line to the other is one way that the offense tries to get the defensive line to declare its strength. Putting the WR in motion forces the defense to either show a man-to-man coverage (if the defender runs with the WR) or a zone coverage (if the cover men bump).
Using motion to change the offense’s strong side creates a problem for a pressure disguise, especially a walk-up pressure look. The defenders’ first responsibility is to ensure proper coverage, so if maintaining a disguise against motion is going to threaten coverage, the defenders have to get out of the disguise.
4. Snap Count. To beat a disguising defense, the offense has two options when it comes to the snap count. The first is to use a quick count so that the defense doesn’t have a chance to change. However, this doesn’t allow the offense to make a good pre-snap read.
The other choice is to use a double cadence if the offense wants to give itself and the coaches a little extra time to study the defensive switches.