Football 101: Cover 3 Defense

With football season approaching us, it is important that you understand some of the more reiterated parts of the game. So today's look into the strategy of the game within the game is a detailed analysis of the Cover 3 defense.

When you hear the announcer refer to the Cover 3 defense, he or she could be talking about any concept where the defense has only 1 safety deep. However, for the purposes of this argument, we'll take Cover 3 for what it technically means in football, which is a zone coverage consisting of 3 defensive players covering the deep part of the field in thirds. Cover 3 can be used with a variety of underneath converges, and it is often used with a blitz or stunt from the box.

But first, let's start up front, where the action gets done. A Cover 3 defense can be ran out of both a 43 and 34 defense. However, as with most zone coverages, there will probably be at least 4 men rushing, and if it's a blitz, the defense will send at least 5 men to rush after the quarterback (despite the fact that it has been statistically proven that a 5 man rush is really no better at getting to the quarterback than 4-man rush, but that's a story for another day).

Because a Cover 3 defense is often played with a blitz underneath it, defenses usually run stunts with the linebackers and defensive line out of this coverage. Thus, this is where you get your looping defensive tackles, your linebacker twists, and your defensive ends dropping into coverage. And the fact that only 3 defensive backs are needed for deep coverage, Cover 3 is where you generally get your safety or cornerback blitzes as well.

However, with 3 people deep, you need to have at least 3 people playing underneath coverage. So if you're going to blitz, only 5 defensive players can do so, leaving 3 players to cover 3 sections of the field: the middle of the field, and the two curl zones.

If however there is no blitz, and only 4 men rush, that leaves 4 players to cover the underneath zones, and basically what you have is two-curl flat players covering 10-12 yards deep near the hash marks, and two hook players, splitting the middle of the field at about a 12-yard depth.

That finally brings us to the 3 defensive backs playing deep coverage. Typically, you'll have the corners play the outside thirds by lining up over the receivers and retreating right before the ball is hiked so that they can get as deep as the deepest man in the zone, or in the zone next to them. Thus, that leaves one of the safeties playing "center field", whereby they go as deep as any player goes on the field and tries to make a play on the ball once it is thrown.

However, different variations of the Cover 3 can have two safeties playing deep, with one of safeties playing "center field," and the other covering one of the outside thirds in place of a cornerback, who may be blitzing or playing a curl flat zone.

And there you have it. That is the Cover 3. Now when you hear that on television this fall, you will know what to expect from the defense and you can begin to see what kind of adjustments the offense makes to defeat it.