re: WaPo: How the Saints salvaged their secondary and became a legitimate NFC threat

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So our turn around has acctually coincided with us playing more zone? Seems like a lot of armchair quarterbacks were swearing our early season ills were caused by us playing too much zone. Interesting tidbit.

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well that and we're blitzing a shite ton more

blitzing gives QBs less time to wait for our DBs to fudge up

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Seems like a lot of armchair quarterbacks were swearing our early season ills were caused by us playing too much zone.

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It's more about what the outside corners are playing, and they've been playing more man since the Minny game.

You're not going to play all man or all zone underneath with the LBs/nickel, and you are going to change up what the safeties do play to play.

But when they went with almost strictly cover 3/soft cover 2 with some way off man on long 3rds against the Vikes it ended badly.

Zone can be good if you mix in it with man, and unless you have 3 shutdown corners you're not going to play strictly man all the time. The key is to find the right balance and that was with our outside corners playing press man most of the time while changing coverages with everyone else.

Allen also seems to have changed the types of zone plays he's running (or maybe some of the guys like Harris and Anzalone were just consistently blowing coverage like Vaccaro was in deep zones).

We aren't allowing backs to run free near as much any more when going to zone. That was a frequent calling card of Allen since he came back. They'd play off zone and let the backs/TEs/under routes run free and try to run up and tackle from 10+ yards back.

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So our turn around has acctually coincided with us playing more zone? Seems like a lot of armchair quarterbacks were swearing our early season ills were caused by us playing too much zone. Interesting tidbit.

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I mean what did you expect? Not exactly uncommon for this board to know everything.