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In Praise Of ... Defense
| June 13, 2019 01:14PM | Registered: 14 years ago Posts: 26,176 Status: HOF Inductee |
In Praise Of ... Defense
By JENNY VRENTAS
When the Rams beat the Chiefs, 54-51, on Monday Night Football in November, many saw it as the pinnacle of the 2018 season. Fourteen incredible touchdowns! More than passing 400 yards for both QBs! The high-octane game that saved the NFL!
Me? I prefer the 13–3 slugfest played in Atlanta on Feb. 3.
No, this is not still Bad Takes Week. As a follow-up to that, we were asked to write in earnest praise of something we love about the NFL. And, I love defense. This is in spite of all the rules designed to favor the offense—or, perhaps, because of them. When NFL teams play good defense today, it means even more, because it’s almost anachronistic.
As the 2018 season barreled ahead, with the most touchdowns scored in a single season in league history, I kept waiting for the defensive counterpunch. “Defense is play recognition,” Rams defensive coordinator Wade Phillips said one afternoon in December, and so I eagerly anticipated all these jet motions and surface-level misdirection tactics reaching the point of saturation where defenders were no longer fooled. Then, on the final day of the season, we got our sweet reward.
The Patriots’ post-Super Bowl LIII locker room was one of the most interesting in recent memory—barring, of course, the one in which Tom Brady had his jersey snatched—in hearing players and coaches explain how they held a Rams offense that had averaged nearly 33 points per game during the regular season to a grand total of three. The Patriots, a heavy man coverage team for most of the season, used a cover-4 (quarters) match-up zone coverage on first and second downs, a way to neutralize the in-breaking routes off play-action as well as the shifts and motions off of which the Rams offense had thrived last season. Up front, the Patriots played two linebackers on the line of scrimmage in a six-man front, putting them in position to either close off the Rams’ outside zone-running lanes or disrupt the receivers lined up in tight splits.
In the days following Super Bowl LIII, my mother relayed that she had taken exception to other patrons at her gym lamenting that the game was boring. “They must not like defense!” she remarked. (Our Andy Benoit concurs with my mom and me.)
Go to Full Article--
[www.si.com]
By JENNY VRENTAS
When the Rams beat the Chiefs, 54-51, on Monday Night Football in November, many saw it as the pinnacle of the 2018 season. Fourteen incredible touchdowns! More than passing 400 yards for both QBs! The high-octane game that saved the NFL!
Me? I prefer the 13–3 slugfest played in Atlanta on Feb. 3.
No, this is not still Bad Takes Week. As a follow-up to that, we were asked to write in earnest praise of something we love about the NFL. And, I love defense. This is in spite of all the rules designed to favor the offense—or, perhaps, because of them. When NFL teams play good defense today, it means even more, because it’s almost anachronistic.
As the 2018 season barreled ahead, with the most touchdowns scored in a single season in league history, I kept waiting for the defensive counterpunch. “Defense is play recognition,” Rams defensive coordinator Wade Phillips said one afternoon in December, and so I eagerly anticipated all these jet motions and surface-level misdirection tactics reaching the point of saturation where defenders were no longer fooled. Then, on the final day of the season, we got our sweet reward.
The Patriots’ post-Super Bowl LIII locker room was one of the most interesting in recent memory—barring, of course, the one in which Tom Brady had his jersey snatched—in hearing players and coaches explain how they held a Rams offense that had averaged nearly 33 points per game during the regular season to a grand total of three. The Patriots, a heavy man coverage team for most of the season, used a cover-4 (quarters) match-up zone coverage on first and second downs, a way to neutralize the in-breaking routes off play-action as well as the shifts and motions off of which the Rams offense had thrived last season. Up front, the Patriots played two linebackers on the line of scrimmage in a six-man front, putting them in position to either close off the Rams’ outside zone-running lanes or disrupt the receivers lined up in tight splits.
In the days following Super Bowl LIII, my mother relayed that she had taken exception to other patrons at her gym lamenting that the game was boring. “They must not like defense!” she remarked. (Our Andy Benoit concurs with my mom and me.)
Go to Full Article--
[www.si.com]
| Subject | Author | Views | Posted |
|---|---|---|---|
 | RamBill | 478 | June 13, 2019 01:14PM |
| Classicalwit | 119 | June 13, 2019 05:33PM |
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