Loading Up the Box and Playing Man-to-Man Defense

by: Greg Etter
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In order for any scheme or technique to be successful your coaches must believe in them, understand them, and be able to properly teach them. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a group of coaches who do all of the above with passion and excellence!

     At Carthage College, our defensive philosophy is to stop the run by “Loading up the Box.” We do this by playing Man-to-Man defense. Our Man-to-Man Package includes bringing maximum pressure or playing Man Free. No matter what formation we see in our Man Free Package we will always have an Over the Top Player, and a Zone Off (See Diagram 1).

Diagram 1.

The Zone Off can play a variety of different techniques, depending on our opponent and game plan. These techniques include:

•    QB Eyes
•    Collision Crossers
•    Double a WR
•    Spy the QB

    The first technique is reading the eyes of the quarterback. This is also our base technique. The coaching points are to not drop deeper than 10 yards, read the quarterback’s eyes and stay between the hash marks. We want him to anticipate the throw and break early. If the quarterback goes to his second read then our Zone Off has done the job.

    The second technique is to collision the crossers (See Diagram 2).

Diagram 2.

We like to use this to discourage offenses from running crossing routes. Wide receivers must know that they will be hit if coming through the middle. If the Zone Off has a deep and a shallow crosser then he will always step up and get the immediate threat or shallow crosser (See Diagram 3).

Diagram 3.


    Our third technique is to double or bracket a wide receiver. We will use this technique when facing a dominant wide receiver. In this technique our Zone Off player will turn his eyes immediately to the wide receiver and play the inside half of all inside routes. Our DB assigned to that man will play his technique from outside leverage (See Diagram 4).

Diagram 4.

Once the wide receiver declares an outside route then the Zone Off player frees up and plays the “Zone Off” technique (See Diagram 5).

Diagram 5.

The double technique is also built into the defense as an automatic call if the offense has created a mismatch by ability.

    If our LB must cover a tailback he can, and should, ask for help from our Zone Off person. Besides getting a double team on a wide receiver we like this technique to shut down outside routes. By playing the primary cover guy in outside leverage we feel that we have the advantage on outside routes.

    The last technique we teach is to “Spy the Quarterback.” We will utilize this when playing a mobile QB or a team that runs a QB Draw. In this technique our Zone Off will just sit at depth and read the QB. If he breaks the containment or attempts a draw our Zone Off should attack immediately (See Diagram 6).

Diagram 6.

This really frees up our defensive line to get after the QB and not worry about containment.

    We will utilize any or all of these techniques in a game, depending on the type of offense we are playing against. With the ability to play each of these techniques, our Man to Man Package is flexible enough to take away the strengths of our opponent.

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