How To Read Football Coverages

 To read football coverages you have to know what a football coverage is. A coverage is the way that the defense specifically the Defensive backs as well as the linebackers are choosing to defend the Offense's passes. It is basically their 'Strategy' on the play to not allow the offense to throw the ball. Now we have to understand what coverages there are and what they mean. Let's start simple and work our way up. 

-Cover 0; Cover 0 or Man to Man means that all players on the offense that are eligible to catch a pass from the Quarterback will be covered by a single player on the defense. So, if there is 5 players for the offense that can go out to catch a pass there will be exactly 5 people on the defense who will account for them individually and the other 6 players on defense will rush the Quarterback.

-Cover 1; Similar to Cover 0 means that all players on the offense that are eligible to catch a pass from the Quarterback will be covered by a single player on the defense along with an extra defender playing Single high coverage protecting the middle of the field in case one of the man to man defenders loses- He is basically like an insurance policy in case something goes wrong he is suppose to help before it gets worse. So, if there is 5 players for the offense that can go out to catch a pass there will be exactly 6 people on the defense who will account for them.

-Cover 2; or 2 high coverage has 2 defenders playing deep halves meaning they split the field in half and both play in their deep half. There is usually 5 defenders playing underneath these half field safeties; the 2 corners whose job is to play the flats which is the area near the line of scrimmage close to the sidelines, the 2 linebackers that play their hook drop inside and underneath both the half field safeties and also the 1 middle dropper who carries anyone up the center of the field. The reason for this is the half field safeties have to cover a lot of ground sideline to sideline and that leaves the deep middle field open which is why the middle dropper is suppose to help that but usually is hard for this player because linebackers have a harder time running at full speed with receivers- the idea is to put pressure on the QB to air the ball over the linebackers head that way the safeties have more time to get to the middle of the field. That also mean there is only 4 players to rush the QB now with 7 defenders in Coverage.

-Cover 3; Is where you use 3 defenders to split the deep part of the field into Thirds. Both the Corners to play deep and outside between the numbers on the field and the hash on the field and a Single safety to defend the deep middle part of the field. Underneath that you have 4 defenders; 2 flat defenders like mentioned in cover 2 along with 2 hook droppers also similarly mentioned in cover 2. Except in Cover 3 we now don't have a middle dropper we have a deep middle third Safety to defend the middle third. So we have 7 defenders to cover and 4 defenders to rush the Quarterback.

-There are more coverages but we will leave it at that for now-these are the basic simple coverages most teams use on a regular basis.

How to identify them now. Well we need to look at the safeties. The 2 safeties tell us the biggest chunks of information we need like what coverage the entire defense is in. Ok so, if the 2 safeties are both standing deep near the hashes and the corners are both close to the WR's on the line of scrimmage it's likely that the coverage is Cover 2. If 1 safety looks like he going to go deep in the middle and the other is showing like he's going to come down we can either have Cover 3  or Cover 1; We can check the corners now to see whether it's man or zone and even use motions as well. If the corners are playing tight on the WR's near the LOS (Line of Scrimmage) and if they follow the WR's when we send the WR's in motion we have Cover 1, but if we see the corners getting ready to bail out and no one is following WR's when they are going in motion we have Cover 3. Now obviously defenses try to move around and disguise that way Quarterbacks can't which tell coverage is being played pre-snap as soon as the ball is snapped we should be able to see these Coverages show themselves. Cover 0 is quite obvious both safeties are ready to come down along with the corners and if we send WR's in motion there are defenders going with them.