How Do You Negate an Outstanding Wideout?

by: Dan Weil
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How then do you stop a receiver who can take the game away from you? We asked four expert coaches for their thoughts on the subject: Jerry Moore, head coach of defending Division I-AA champion Appalachian State University; John Wiley, his defensive coordinator; Lyle Setencich, defensive coordinator at Texas Tech University; and Gary DeLoach, defensive secondary coach at UCLA.

PRE-GAME PREPARATION
    In scouting and looking at films of top receivers, “The first thing you need to know is what he is capable of doing,” Moore said. “Does he run good precise routes? Do you have to be worried about him catching the ball underneath and going all the way? Is he a guy who will run past you? Does he have incredible natural ability, or is he a student of the game who knows all the coverages? How physical is he? You’d want to know the two or three things he does the best, because he’d certainly have a lot of confidence in those things. Is he a guy that breaks tackles, or do you bring him down easy, but he’s hard to stay up with speed-wise?”

    DeLoach said the first thing he and his staff look at is where the receiver lines up. “How are they trying to get him in a one-on-one match-up? It might be the backside of a three-by-one formation. They can line him up as a slot to get him positioned against a linebacker. That’s what USC did with Mike Williams.” Next you want to look at what routes the receiver runs, DeLoach said. “Keary Colbert, the former USC receiver, was big on doing a double move. He would do a post-corner or a corner-post.”

    When his defensive backs are watching film of the opponent, DeLoach tells them to just focus on the receiver. “A lot of times they’re watching schemes and plays.
With a dominant receiver, you have to just get in and watch him. We do that Thursday night. We tell our guys just watch what he’s doing every play, so they know his moves and what he tries to do.”

    Setencich focuses on teaching his players the receiver’s splits and breaking points by formation. “We look at what they like out of splits and formations and align accordingly,” he said.

    All the coaches stress to their players not to worry about the receiver catching a few balls – that’s going to happen. You just want to prevent the receiver from making big plays and taking over the game. “A great receiver will catch some balls on you,” Moore said. “You can’t go out thinking you’ll shut the guy down completely. But you don’t let that get in your head. You’ll break up some balls yourself, and maybe even pick a ball.”

HOW TO STOP HIM DURING THE GAME
    The coaches offered several strategies for neutralizing the WR on the field. Appalachian State has three different defensive calls that it will use, Wiley said. All three look similar prior to the snap, so that the offense can’t figure out what’s coming before the play begins.
1. Double-Team the Receiver. “We’ll let the corner bump, and the safety goes over the top to help,” Wiley said. “We have a long history of good man-to-man coverage. Anytime you give the cornerback help, over time, he becomes that much more aggressive, and he can take away underneath routes – curls, outs and ins.”

2. Blitz to the Receiver’s Side. “We’ll use a zone dog scheme in which we blitz where he lines up,” Wiley said. “We anticipate which hot route he’ll run and use a coverage to take that route away from him. We’re forcing the ball his way, but forcing them to use a pre-determined route to counter our blitz.”

3. Blitz Away from the Receiver’s Side. “We design this blitz to force the ball to go away from him,” Wiley said.

    The key is to have more than one option, he said. “If you go in with just one answer, people will adjust. You want to have things that look similar at the start” but are fundamentally different.

    Setencich said that the main goal is to disrupt the rhythm of either the quarterback or the receiver. And like Wiley, he stressed that disguise is crucial. “You want to show the receiver and quarterback one coverage and roll to another. You might show a blitz and get out of it sometimes and actually blitz other times. You can show a soft corner and then squat down and play a cover two to re-route the receiver from his original path.

    “You can show a soft safety concept and then roll up to the corner, so that they have to re-route over the top. You have a three-deep roll zone and try to disrupt them with a third safety behind the corner to protect you deep.”

    In a roll zone, assuming you have four players in the secondary, the cornerback on the side of the dominant receiver rolls up to him. The safety on that side of the field goes to the top in case the receiver runs by the cornerback. The opposite safety goes to the middle of the field, and the other corner covers the other third of the field.

    “You have four men under and three deep, giving you a chance to take away that receiver,” Setencich said. And putting a cornerback tight on the receiver gives the cornerback an opportunity to get physical with the receiver and knock him off his route. But Moore noted that if you’re trying to get physical with a receiver who’s big and physical himself, “you may be wasting your time.”

    Setencich cited other possibilities too. “If you’re playing four corners, you can roll to a cover two or a man robber.” That last strategy involves one safety deep in the middle and one safety “robbered up” to double-team the receiver. The downside: “That puts you in a four-man rush with your linebacker on the tight end,” so
you’ll have to substitute a defensive back for a linebacker if you want to avoid that.

    Like Wiley, Setencich mentioned the possibility of blitzing toward the receiver’s side to take him out of the play or blitzing to the other side. If you use a blitz away from the receiver and employ zone coverage, you’ll be able to guard better against a deep vertical threat than you would with man coverage, but you’ll be vulnerable to the short pass.

    Setencich noted that a mobile quarterback can make you pay for a zone blitz. “USC had a zone blitz on Texas, and the defensive end covered Roy Williams, who went vertical. Then Vince Young ran right to the spot where the end left.”

    DeLoach said that when USC put running back Reggie Bush in the slot to use him as a receiver, UCLA would have to double team. “They had him matched on a linebacker, so we doubled him with a linebacker and a safety. Then everybody else had to play one-on-one, but we couldn’t cover Reggie with just a linebacker.”

    You can run a straight double-team on a receiver with a cornerback and safety or a roll-up coverage of the kind Setencich suggested. In terms of double-teaming, “that’s about all you can do,” DeLoach said.

    And like the other coaches, he sees disguise as a critical element of your defense in stopping a standout receiver. “You have to not let them know that you’re doubling or rolling toward the receiver. I like to make all the coverages look the same. If we’re in a single-safety look, then I want that all the time, whether we’re rolling, doubling or blitzing.”

    Moore also emphasizes disguise. “Most of us will show two-three looks that from the sideline seem the same. Then you roll or move to another alignment at the snap,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a guessing game. We might line-up in a plain old Cover Three. Then just prior to the snap, we might bring the safety down and jump our linebacker underneath on the snap, anticipating a hook or end route.”

    DeLoach said UCLA shies away from blitzing much because it carries too much risk. “You can’t guarantee that a blitz will succeed unless you overload, so that you have one more guy than they have blockers. But you still have to get there [to the quarterback before he releases the ball]. Otherwise, he’ll win that match-up.”

    UCLA’s base defense is two deep in a zone. “We’re more of a true zone cover team. We trust in that to deal with any receiver,” DeLoach said. “Of course that makes it harder to play the run. It puts more pressure on your upfront people because defensive backs aren’t in the box.” But, of course, any strategy you use carries some risk.

    Wiley said focusing exclusively on a dominant receiver doesn’t make much sense if your opponent has other strong offensive weapons. For example when Appalachian State went up against Marshall University’s Randy Moss, Marshall would deploy triple receivers on one side and isolate Marshall on the other. “If you rolled up to double him, they had a slot receiver they’d go to,” Wiley said.

THE RED ZONE
    Your strategy against the dominant receiver might differ in this area, because the receiver has less room to work with. “Your help-over-the-top and press alignment probably wouldn’t do it there, because the field isn’t as long,” Wiley said. “You’d probably use more inside-outside schemes there, because the deep ball isn’t as much of a threat. Your safety would come inside to help the cornerback defend inside routes like slants, and your cornerback would overplay to the outside route.”

    DeLoach said you might be able to play a little more man-to-man in the Red Zone because of the smaller space. “But if it’s a dominant receiver, you don’t want to do that too much,” as he’ll be tough to cover with one man, no matter how little space he has, particularly if he’s a good leaper.”

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