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Join us on a journey of pass coverages. Once a simple concept, they've become one of the most complex parts of football as defensive coordinators have looked for ways to get the most out of man and zone concepts. State is not the most complex team in its coverages, but it's good at what it does and it's creative in how it gets there. Let's take a look at two coverages that make up most of the snaps, and then a few the Pack sprinkles in. Note that this list is not exhaustive
Cover 1
Cover 1 is a pretty basic coverage that features one middle-of-the-field (MOF) safety and man assignments across the board. Like any man-to-man coverage, it’s extremely versatile and effective against a wide array of passing concepts without sacrificing bodies in the box. Also, like any man-to-man coverage, you have to be able to win in man to execute it, otherwise your day will get long very quickly.
State is pretty good in man coverage thanks to players like Aydan White. Once again, scouting and development are the storyline here. It’s a personnel-first game. State’s defense does some fun things schematically, but it’s truly not all that creative from a coverage perspective. It has really good players.
Cover 1 often designates a coverage and a box safety. In 2023, Sean Brown was usually the box safety and Bishop Fitzgerald or Devon Boykin were often that coverage safety. In cover 1, Brown would typically have a run fit and a coverage assignment, while the coverage safety would be tasked with covering the deep post area of the field.
Man helps to cancel out the numbers issues that vertical concepts can create. Part of the reason why State doesn’t see a tremendous amount of four verticals, even as a team that plays a zone that’s vulnerable to it (we’ll get to this in a second) is because it not only plays a lot of man, it’s really good at it.
Where man becomes vulnerable to scheme is in the crossing routes that can create traffic over the middle of the field. The mesh concept is the poster boy for this kind of approach. Part of the beauty of cover 1 though is it allows for extra guys in the box. If you get 10 personnel from the offense and you’re in cover 1, you’re going to get seven guys in the box and only six gaps to fit. Frequently, cover 1 teams will include a rat player who is essentially a zone player in the shallow middle. His job is to help protect against these crossing routes while also sometimes being a spy on the quarterback.
Here’s a very basic cover 1 set from NC State
Personally, I think State is at its best in cover 1. It's had great corners that have made this so, and manning up cancels out a lot of RPO stuff and gives State more opportunities to pressure the quarterback.
Cover 3
When State plays zone, it’s usually a spot-drop cover 3 team. Cover 3 out of a 3-3-5 gives you five underneath defenders. It’s a pretty comprehensive type of zone that’s built to deal with lots of different passing concepts and gives you lots of opportunities to be creative with linebacker pressures.
There are ton of ways to get to cover 3, the most common being a one-high look with your cornerbacks bailing to their respective deep thirds. State has gotten to its cover 3 in a number of different ways, but the most common for the Pack is really a three-high structure pre-snap that puts both safeties and the nickel at the top of the defense and keeps the corners underneath in the flats. Sometimes it looks more like cloud, which is a two-high look that transforms to cover 3 post-snap. Sometimes it might actually be cloud. State has plenty of ways to mix up the looks.
Here’s the pre-snap picture of a three high look.
One thing that's nice about Gibson's defense is that the coverages aren't super complicated but it does have a lot of ways to get to them, making it easier to execute while still creating varying looks for the quarterback. Creating different looks is a strength at times, and the best example is probably the UNC game last year.
Here is cover 3 cloud.
It's the same structure as before, but out of a two-high shell pre-snap. Instead of two safeties and a nickel forming the top of the defense, it's two safeties and the field corner. You can see Shyheim Battle bail to his third at the bottom of the screen. There are a lot of variations to get to this. One snap after this, State played cover 2 man out of the same shell, a coverage it plays sparingly. Two very different coverages out of the same picture creates an opportunity to confuse a quarterback, and a confused quarterback is a bad quarterback.
Cover 3 has two main weaknesses: Hi-lo reads on the MOF safety and four verticals. The first question you have to answer when you want to install a cover 3 coverage is how you deal with four verticals. It’s the play that fundamentally changed defensive football because it created so many problems for spot-drop cover 2 and cover 3 defenses. 4 is more than 3, so you can see where the problem arises. Zoning the field into thirds and then having four receivers in that part of the field is no bueno. It requires some kind of play-specific answer.
Here’s an example of the problem this play causes.
There are four routes at the second level of the defense and three defenders. You need a specific process for this play if you're going to play this type of defense. I find State's process interesting. It prefers to play this from the original cover 3 structure instead of employing some kind of pattern matching concept.
How it does this is it asks one of the deep zone players to midpoint two of the routes while the other two each take one of the remaining routes. It tries to be really physical at the break to throw off the timing and then it squeezes the windows with corners trailing the verticals. You can see Battle at the bottom of the screen fall with the route after the receiver clears him.
Above is what it looks like when it doesn’t work. Battle does not prevent an outside release, which you generally want him to do here, and the safety works too far toward the sideline, opening up the space for the throw to the special route. Four verticals from a 3x1 instead of a 2x2 usually features a special route from number three, which is similar to an over route and is not a true vertical. This helps with route distribution among other things. Brown is the safety at the bottom of the screen and does not ID the route entering his area.
Here is what it looks like when it does work.
The corner forces an inside release (basically goes out of bounds to do so). Brown at safety does a much better job staying at the midpoint of the two routes. You can actually see him turn his head back when he sees the weak side receiver is vertical, where he IDs the special route and adjusts his spot to stay between them. There are still windows to make throws here, but they are much smaller and require a lot of arm talent and timing to hit.
Personally, I think State could carry one of these verticals with the linebacker. It’s a very common approach to dealing with this stuff, the risk of course being that you’re creating a poor matchup defensively with a linebacker on a receiver. I think State has the athletes at linebacker to do this, though. Payton certainly had a lot of speed. Sean Brown is now the WLB and he’s another really good athlete who was also a safety.
I’m sure Tony Gibson has his reasons for playing it this way. Maybe he’d rather force a window throw than give a guy a shot at a one-on-one in the seam against a linebacker, putting the onus more on the quarterback and the timing than the athleticism of the receiver. I don’t know for sure, though. He won’t return my calls.
Other coverages
Cover 0
State will also play cover 0 with some of its blitz packages. There are always a few snaps in cover 0 each game. Cover 0 is exactly what it sounds like: man across the board with no help.
Cover 2 Variations
State does not play a tremendous amount of cover 2, but it sprinkles it in opportunistically. It will play some cover 2 man, which is just man-to-man but with two safeties instead of one. This has obvious advantages against downfield passing concepts, but it lowers your box count and tends to be very vulnerable to mobile quarterbacks. Cover 2 man is something that makes some sense against the deep choice concepts Tennessee runs, but the mobility of its quarterback probably limits how much of this State will play in that game.
State also plays cover 2 invert, a variation of cover 2 that bails the corners to the deep halves and keeps the safeties low (shoutout to Phillip Danford's interview with Bishop Fitzgerald for clarifying this when I thought it was a less common coverage called P 33 Buzz, which I think State has played some). Cover 2 invert is one of the few coverages State uses that employs some pattern matching concepts. Pattern matching concepts in the simplest terms are zone/man hybrids that are striving to get the best of both. They're wildly popular. True cover 2 is comically vulnerable to a play like four verticals, so State asks its low safeties to run with verticals here as if its man and play their underneath zone if they don't get a vertical threat.
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