Ivy Week: Dartmouth Is Bringing The Cover 2 Back
Dartmouth has an interesting approach to shutting down RPOs.
There’s a lot that can be learned from football programs that have to work around severe talent restrictions. It’s been true for decades. More often that not, football innovation starts at the bottom, usually in high school, and then slowly moves up into the lower levels of college. Then, an FCS coach gets hired at a major school and suddenly, everyone is doing it.
It happened with the spread option, with RPOs, with just about every major change to the sport. Installing a new scheme or system requires brings with it a lot of risk and at lower level jobs, the risk is never going to be as significant, giving coaches more room to try new things. On top of that, at the lower levels of football, talent is naturally lower and working around that requires coaches to get creative.
In other words, there’s a good reason that a lot of college football’s most innovative minds came from tiny schools like New Hampshire, Fordham or, in the old days, Miami (OH).
That’s also why looking at schools that have less to work with can often serve as a way to see the future of the sport. If an FCS program is having success doing something strange, it usually means that Alabama and Ohio State are going to be running it in five years, because if a system can work with a little talent, it can usually work even better with a lot of it.
One of the best places to look for new things in recent years has been the Ivy League, partially because of the baked in disadvantage that its schools have in recruiting and partially because of the sweet deal that the league has with television networks to get a Friday night game on TV once a week. It was almost impossible to find Ivy League games prior to just a few years ago, but now that a decent amount of the product is readily available, it serves as one of the best learning resources in the sport.
Because this is a newsletter than loves and supports all levels of college football, I figured that we could afford a week off from the glitz and the glamour of major college football and take a trip to the Ivy League. Welcome to Ivy Week.
No one in coaching has found a strong, definitive answer to the rise of run-pass options. That’s normal in football. The innovation cycle is such that defensive innovation is usually a couple years behind anything that offenses are doing, though the process has been shortened significantly by the proliferation of film and communication online.
Still, college football is currently in the “offensive explosion” part of the innovation cycle, where the hot new thing has caught on with just about every major team and is being used to create some of the best offenses in the history of the sport. It happened with read options, the air raid, spread and just about every major change to offensive football since the sport has been played.
The cycle will be shorter than any that came before it, just as the next offensive change will pop up in just a couple years, but it’s still very much in process right now and because we’re in the offensive explosion phase, defensive coaches all over are looking for a magic bullet to stop it.
Unlike a lot of the cycles before it, the RPO cycle presents a pretty unique challenge to defenses, because it’s built specifically around toeing the lines of the rulebook in a way that defenses can’t. Defensive coordinators complain constantly about offensive linemen blocking down the field on passing plays and while it’s easy to roll your eyes at, it is a legitimately difficult issue to work around for people building defenses. The blockers downfield serve as a serious disruption to the traditional reads that defenders are supposed to make.
I’ve touched on it before on this newsletter, but RPOs have essentially killed one-gap technique from man coverage, because linebackers are unable to read run or pass based on their traditional cues. While they would usually use run blocking as sign to collapse in, that’s suddenly become a very easy way to open up the middle of the field for a quick hitter to a tight end. It’s a form of misdirection that works so well because it’s specifically designed to go against what defenders are taught.
Because of that, there really isn’t one good way to truly shut down the RPOs. Some teams, like Ohio State, have had success running with a single-high safety cover 3 look, bringing a slot corner onto the field and using a third linebacker as a hybrid to deal with tight ends. It leaves just six defenders consistently in the box which would leave less talented teams in serious trouble against the run, but it guards against the pass pretty well, especially for teams consistently pulling in top 15 recruiting classes.
Other teams, like Clemson, have moved to a cover 4 look, selling out to stop big plays in hopes that offenses won’t be willing to win with five-yard gains every play. It also works well to eliminate the passing game, but again asks a lot of linebackers to stop a halfback while playing from five or six yards away from the line of scrimmage as soon as the ball is snapped.
Then there are man coverage teams, my least favorite of the bunch, which hope to overload the backfield before the quarterback can really make a read and depend on really strong coverage abilities from outside cornerbacks without help to the inside. If executed flawlessly it would work to effectively shut down the RPO, but college football isn’t about flawless.
One approach that I haven’t seen much of, however, is the cover 2. Cover 2 has fallen out of college football in recent years because of how poorly it handles deep passes to the perimeter, a staple of spread offenses, but in at least one place, it’s making a return as a way to combat the RPOs: Dartmouth.
Dartmouth rode a system primarily built around cover 2 to a 9-1 record and the best defense in the Ivy League last season. In a league that relies so heavily on RPOs (it’s a staple for pretty much every offense), that tells us that there’s probably something to be said for using the cover 2 as an RPO stopper and that it may translate up to the higher levels of the sport.
Firstly, it makes sense, just from a personnel and positioning perspective. With five defenders underneath, three of which could easily be cornerbacks in a 4-2-5 system, there’s a lot of padding underneath to protect against quick slants and screens, while defenders will still be close enough to the box to stop the run.
Secondly, the weaknesses of the defense really don’t present themselves against something like RPOs. Because the line is run blocking, the pass has to come out quickly, meaning that there really isn’t going to be a ton of time to attack the defense to the perimeter 15+ yards down the field. Obviously on non-RPO plays this can still cause some trouble, but purely from slowing down the hottest thing in football, cover 2 honestly makes quite a bit of sense.
You see that a little bit here. It’s fourth-and-short, so the defense is a bit closer to the line than usual, but the idea is the same. With help in the middle to protect against the run, the outside zone defenders are free to play more aggressively against both slants and screens. Here, with a screen, the outside defenders read it immediately because they’re watching and reacting and while the pass is incomplete, there are three defenders swarming to the ball as soon as it’s thrown.
This is a pure screen rather than an RPO, but it’s the same idea. With help in the middle and outside defenders reading and reacting to the offense, threats to the perimeter are much easier to track and take care of. It’s never ideal to put your cornerback in an open field tackle situation like this, but the rest of the defense is so quick to the ball that it really shouldn’t ever be a huge issue, especially if the cornerbacks are any good.
To prevent relying too heavily on one look, Dartmouth varied the five underneath defenders, which again requires good cornerbacks, but can work really well when done correctly. With the left side of the offense overloaded, Dartmouth rotates the weakside corner into a deep half zone, bringing up a safety into the underneath zone to deal either with a run, or a pass away from the strength of the position. The ball goes away from the safety and corner flip so it doesn’t really matter, but this is a cool way to get stronger run defenders in the box without sacrificing personnel groupings or taking a cornerback off of the field.
The safeties are really the heart of this defense. While being asked to do quite a bit on the back end, Dartmouth’s safeties were still willing to come up and make a play right near the line of scrimmage when they saw it coming. The safety reads the bubble screen and - knowing that the outside corner is playing man on the No. 1 receiver - steps up and makes a brilliant play to give the rest of his defense more time to make the tackle. This takes a smart and athletic safety to pull off, but a good deal of major programs have that at their disposal and could easily make this work.
When you combine all of that back seven work that Dartmouth does to protect against the pass and pair it with a pretty stout run defense, I think that the foundation is there for something that could work, and work well, for a whole lot of defenses. It isn’t for everybody because of the need for flexible hybrid players and talent in the backfield, but the principles aren’t complicated and they make a lot of sense for stopping what most modern offenses are running now.
It would likely need to be blended with some cover 4, blitzes and man, which Dartmouth does a little bit of, but if it can work in an RPO-crazy conference like the Ivy League, there’s a pretty good argument to be made that the cover 2 can work anywhere.
Up next: Yale is running Clemson’s offense without Clemson talent… and it still works
Graphic by Kristen Lillemoen