FBCP Episode 01 – Coaching Football’s Zone Read Play

Joe Daniel: Hi I’m Joe Daniel of Football-Defense.com

Nate Albaugh: And I’m Nate Albaugh, ChiefPigskin.com

Joe Daniel: And today we’re going to be talking about the zone read – one of the most popular plays in football today. I’ve seen a lot of it. I see it probably 5 or 6 weeks out of the season. Coach, you’re not seeing it quite as much, are you?

Nate Albaugh: No, we’re not seeing it much at all. I don’t think it’s necessarily our area – Illinois area. I think it just happens to be, per conference I know you and I were talking earlier, seems that you really have, seems like conference to conference, there’s heavy schemes in one direction or another. It just so happens the conferences I’ve been in the last 6/7 years, we’ve seen little to no zone.

Joe Daniel: Yeah, and that’s, you know, we don’t seeany dive option. We’ve seen tons and tons of zone read, and are seeing more of it. I think we’ve had a little bit of a shift. Almost every team went back to an I of some sort a little bit too. So we may be shifting away from it as everybody’s running it. We’re just trying to find something that’s new.

We’re going to talk first about the zone blocking with it. We run the zone read. We run zone blocking and there’s a couple different ways that we do it. We do one with the covered-uncovered rule. We’re all of our alignment if we run the zone to the right. They’re looking in their zone which is from their nose to the place I’d nose of the next nose over, plays odd. I’d look in to pick anything up there and if there’s anything there we consider them covered, they’re going to get into that. And if there’s not, then they’re going to be uncovered and work them to get them into a double with the next guy and look into the linebacker.

That’s worked pretty well for us but we have found we have trouble getting into the linebacker sometimes ’cause they’re so keyed in on getting to that double team on the down linemen. But if you get really aggressive linebackers, they’re going to fill up the gap quick. I know I’m sure as a defensive coach, if your guys have seen downhill flow linebackers; they’re coming now to fill it.

Nate Albaugh: Yeah. Well, they better be.

Joe Daniel: Yeah. Ideally, they are, anyway. And that’s how we defended it. In the 4-2-5 if we just had our two guys, our two linebackers, as soon as they saw that downhill, we’re firing out because we were getting hit, more so on the cutback. So we just want to hand-to-hand that guy. The backside linebacker not even worry about scraping over but just fill up all the gaps. And that causes problems as offensive linemen picking all those guys up.

One of the things that we’ve tried to do is go to the – we just step and go. So they’re working that zone and getting vertical now. So they’ll step, we’ll take a lateral step, and they’re immediately coming up the field, looking to pick up anything in their zone. And that helped us. You know I think one of the things we want to do is just get a hat on a hat. And that’s, I’m sure with any offense and you’ve run some option too, not necessarily from the gun, but run some option and you know you just want to get on those guys so the back can find his way or the quarterback can get his read.

And one of the keys with the zone read is we’re going to leave the end man unblocked. You can run the inside zone and kick out that end man with no read. But with the zone read, we want to leave the end man on the line of scrimmage backside unblocked. And that’s where our quarterback read is going to come in. Now how are you reading your quarterback with your normal option?

Nate Albaugh: How are you going to read the man that’s unblocked?

Joe Daniel: Right.

Nate Albaugh: In any option, you’re going to; mostly you have to pick a point on a man to look at. Most option teams are going to tell you to look at the man’s shoulders. That seems to be the part on him that’s going to be the biggest tell whether or not you should give that ball or keep it. But as any coach, you have to keep in mind that kids screw up and there’s a high level of, you know, the ratio of screw up to success is very high in the beginning. Of course you hope to reduce it as much as possible. And that’s where your repetitions come in like crazy. So I think the question becomes: If you’re going to be a zone team, are you going to option off of the zone? So I know a lot of teams, you can run zone out of one back, out of your one back, out of your I even, you could run zone, then you’re going to keep that unblocked man on honest off ofbootsand make some counters and whatnot. Or you’re going to actually zone read it. So if you’re a zone team, which I’m not, I’ve never been on a team that’s a zone team, I think that would be a question you have to ask yourself; Are we going to commit to running option off of this? Because now that’s a lot of repetition time for your quarterbacks and for your quarterback running back, anyway, I’m sure it’s the same for your line of play. But, one question out for you being on a team that runs the zone, runs a lot of zone, as you’ve said, my question is: What’s the advantage going in? What’s an offensive scheme thinking when they’re saying “Hey, we’re a zone team.”? Why is it a team decides to go to that? You know, I could tell you why I’m a Wing-T guy. Why is a zone team – what are the advantages there?

Joe Daniel: Well, like you said, you have to commit to it. You know, and that was, we’ve run some zone read in the past and didn’t commit to it and there wasn’t an advantage. We were zone blocking and zone reading and not committed to it. There wasn’t any advantage at all because we just weren’t that good at it. And we played teams all the time who run it. I guess because it looks like a good play and there’s no advantage at all unless you commit to it. Because, like you said, that read is crucial. We probably spend 40 percent of our individual time just to zone blocking. Whether it’s inside zone or outside zone, we spend all of our time doing it. And to me, that is the thing you have to do in order to be successful with it but it’s also the advantage. And it’s just like, you know with the option, you are committed to that play. You know that you have to rep it a lot but we run the same drills and practice every day. You know, we’re blocking 2-1-2, with the down line, if we’re playing a 3-3 stack, we’re going to sit there and we’re going to put a down lineman and a stack backer. And we’re going to have him slant and we’re going to drill it to death. So the advantage that we saw going in.

Once we had a quarterback who read it really well. We happened to get fortunate and that we had a kid transfer in. When we initially went, i guess, back to the system and really committed to it was we had a kid who transferred in who had come from a place where he could really read it. They taught him really well to read it. But the commitment to that one play means that we’re just wrapping that to death and you’re getting 2 plays or 3 plays if you bring the pitchman into it, off of that. And like you said with the mistakes, you know there’s going to be mistakes but we don’t even know what’s going to happen when we call it. And I’m sure you found out with the dive option.

Nate Albaugh: Now see, as a coach, I hate that. I hate it when I don’t know what’s going to happen. That drives me nuts. And I think that’s probably one of the small reasons why I ended up going away from a triple-option type of attack is: I feel like when it comes down to making the decisions, I’m way better equipped than all of my athletes, than anyone else in my team. And i thought, I’m going to try to take a lot of that decision-making out of my kids’ hands. Now, you know, in a lot of ways, I think that’s kind of like the old Nemo concept with Finding Nemo. You know, dad had to learn how to let go a little bit. And I think maybe myself as a coach as well, I have to learn how to let go and let my kids play. But it’s tough because you know, you see mistakes happen and you think – is there anything I could have done as a coach to make it so that we didn’t make those mistakes? You know such we’re the problems that I personally have with a lot of option stuff. The option is a killer play, whichever way you run it. From the zone read, if you’re going to run it like how Georgia TEch maybe’s running it, the option absolutely kills and it can’t be defended when it’s well-executed. The problem for me has been executing it well and I think that goes across whatever play or scheme you’re running.

Joe Daniel: Yeah, definitely. The execution is obviously the most important part of it. And that read, you know, when you’re rep’ing that read, we just sit there and read the shoulders also and that shoulder comes down, having the quarterback see it and that’s when he’s going to pull it and try to get around the end. And we want that read to come and tackle the dive back. And that’s just, we see so many bad reads. When we get a good read, it’s a big play. And you know, when the quarterback reads it right, we found that it’s a big play. But you do deal with some mistakes. And one of the things that we do is kind of predetermined. If you’re not sure at all, give the ball and we’ll take our chances with our five linemen blocking. Because if he pulls in on a bad read, he’s one on one with the end, or worse, somebody else on the outside, which gave us problems.

Now, one of the things that we’ve run into with the zone read is if we have that end man out there and we have another guy outside of him. I know I’m sure with the navy options that you got the pitchman taking care of him. One of the things we’ve run into the zone read, we don’t pitch much off of it. And I would love to have that triple option effect out of it. But a lot of times, we’re just running it with the one-back.

So one of the problems we’ve run into and I’ve got to learn more about is what to do, we just give it ’cause I’m thinking that’s an automatic give read because it they’ve got two outside, we should have a numbers advantage inside. And that’s obviously what we’re looking for – it’s that numbers advantage. I know with option football that you’re looking for numbers advantage. If there’s a ton of guys outside, you’re going to look to keep it inside whether to the midline or whatever play you got to get in there.

Nate Albaugh: Yeah, we have to keep everybody on, as obviously. My thought, my first thought, this is coming from a guy who is not a zone guy or a spread guy, but my first thought is if I’m going to have a defensive in there and another guy outside of it, you know, there’s always going to be another guy outside of it because you know, you have more guys out there; you have receivers out there so you know there’s going to be guys outside of it but I guess you’re indicating there’s a guy outside of that D-end that’s actually getting nosy in on the run and I guess that’s really my first thought is if he got another outside linebacker out there, he’s getting nosy on the zone read. Well, you’ve got to give him a reason to stay out on the outside. So maybe if you have no intention at all in giving it to a receiver out there off the zone read, even if you have that, we’ll say, inside slot guy run a bubble. Thus that linebacker has to respect that bubble if you run the bubble at all successfully in the rest of the game. So you know you run a couple bubbles with some success, now you come with your zone read, and you have that inside slots. Instead of coming to block this guy that’s getting nosy, you run bubble. He’s got to respect it. If he doesn’t respect it, we know we can come back bubble. If he does respect it, now he’s out of the way and I can run my zone read and I’ve only got that D-end to worry about.

Joe Daniel: Exactly. And that goes into a whole another world of not just running a single play but what we’re going to run to get that zone read working. And we use, we haven’t thrown much bubble, but we use like an x-screen or an alley screen out there. You know, we’ll take a one-on-one especially if the corner’s off. We’ll definitely take a one-on-one on space with the receiver. Forget that slot guy out there. And one of the things, we do tend to run it out of, we were talking earlier, we tend to run out of a pro set with the split-back gun sometimes as well. Now we can get that pitch element into it some but we don’t have that slot receiver out there which would loosen that guy up. And, you know, when our passing game isn’t going well his own read stokes because we can’t (crossover: “oh absolutely) we can’t handle that guy.

Now as far as the running back, there’s a couple of schools of thought with the running back on the zone just run in general of whether or not he should be reading it as far as getting a read on the down lineman, a 3-technique, and seeing if he comes in to go out or if he goes out to bust it inside and what to look for for the cutback or just to teach him vision. I don’t work a whole lot with the running backs, but to me, ours show off in sublime that that guy’s an athlete. And just let him find the area. So we don’t teach our offensive linemen to do much of anything other than cover those guys up, get them going somewhere and let the back figure it out. I don’t know, how much do you think a back can really read that, especially at high school level, how much do you think a back can read that in that short amount of time?

Nate Albaugh: Well, I think they actually.. Some in my schools of thought in offense is that some positions are more difficult than others. Personally, I think the running back has the easiest job on the field. It’s as natural as anything. You know, run away from the people trying to get you and that’s something that we learn when we are in kindergarten, on the playground at recess. It’s something that even the non-athletic people on your team know how to do and comes naturally to them. You know, run away from the guys trying to catch you. So to me, the running back, and I don’t say this often about many guys on the field, but once the running back has the ball in his hands, his job becomes fairly easy. Now obviously, some are much better at running away from people than others; partly because of speed, others because of vision. And we know, I think both are equally as important. But when you got your running back there, you’re telling us that this is the best guy on our team at number 1 – speed and number 2 – vision. You know, this is the number one guy we’ve got so you have to let the kid, that kid, you give him his aiming point and you say “Go there”. I’m pretty sure the opening will be somewhere in here but you just got to run. And you know, run away from the people trying to get you. And you give that kid that aiming point. That goes across our whole offenses, you know. From the dive option to the Wing-T, you give the kid the aiming point where you believe the hole should be somewhere around here and you say “Alright big guy, you’re a man, you know, see what you can get.”

Joe Daniel: Sure. Yeah, and like any offense has said, he’s going to have to make some adjustments. Nothing’s going to be blocked perfectly. And I tend to agree with you in that we want a guy, the best zone back has great vision. And not everybody’s a natural zone back. Not everybody is a natural – see where everything’s happening. Some guys are just better downhill. You know, the hole’s going to be big app, you’re running big app. You know, the offensive lineman out there will run him over. But that’s not a zone guy to me. I don’t think he’s natural but he’s a zone running back. Well, I don’t think it’s as natural as just running to a hole. But I think some guys, if it comes naturally for them to have that vision, then it’s really going to make them a great zone back. And I tell you the one thing with zone is when they hit that cutback, the first time that they hit the cutback lane, that opens up on zone and they run it for 60 yards because everybody overflowed. It’s a beautiful thing and then you’re going to spend the next two weeks trying to break him of always going to the cutback. So that’s an advantage in this. But once they get used to it, I think that we’ll benefit down the road. You know we’re more of a, I guess a shotgun type of veer blocking two years ago. And so I think we’ll benefit a great deal since our whole program switched over to the zone and to the zone read. I don’t know that our JV and freshmen did this much reading of the zone read but our back certainly got the look of seeing where the hole’s going to open up and that’ll benefit them a lot, just from a vision. And we get to see who’s got vision and who doesn’t.

Nate Albaugh: Right. You know, vision is a huge X-factor in running backs and there are some schemes that don’t need it quite as much as others but I think that the zone-type concept teams, obviously the zone play, requires the most amount of vision from a running back. And in any scheme, sometimes you can get away from the big bruiser and sometimes you need one type of a kid over another. And there’s no doubt that your scheme, I got to believe, requires a kid with great vision.

But I think the biggest question I have in the zone, whether or not a team is going to use it or run it, is: how are we going to block it and how easy is it to teach high school kids how to do it? And that’s something I need to ask you is: do you feel that this is an easy concept to teach kids?

Joe Daniel: I do think it’s an easy concept. I think that your kids, you know, it’s one of those things that the zone and the zone reader are going to look ugly at first. When you first install it, your quarterback’s going to get bad reads, he’s going to pull it and get crushed. He’s not going to get a good, you know with option, he’s going to get into a ride there and they’re not going to know who’s pulling it and who’s keeping it for a second there and you’ll end up with the ball in the ground. With your offensive lineman, it’s going to be the same situation. They’re going to miscommunicate their block sometimes, they may struggle a little bit with picking up slants if they see a 3-5 or anything like that. They may struggle a little bit with that. Then we teach a near-near read where if they’re the uncovered guy, they’re looking at the knee of the next down lineman and see, especially against a head-off gone the next one. If it goes away, just leave him and go to the next level and you’ll find him chasing it. It’s one of those things where it just takes repetition and goes back to we’re running zone, 40 percent of our play calls, then we should get pretty good at it. And we’ve been able to adapt that zone to almost all of our play. We have very few true gap-blocking plays. We’ll still gap-block an inside trap. But even we run, for example, what would look like a power. We’re really just going to zone-block away and pull the guard. So everybody’s taking their regular zone steps, we’re getting the same double teams. So to me, I love Wing-T football but when I started out coaching it, we had just as many mistakes, I think. And that was when I first started coaching was with Wing-T. I don’t see any more mistakes with the zone read. It just takes some time.

For the style of linemen, I think we want guys who are a little bit longer. They don’t necessarily have to be as big. But one of the things that we do with the zone read is we work out of a 2-point stance and I’m sure you’re Wing-T, that must absolutely make you cringe.

Nate Albaugh: It would make me cringe just trying to run a Wing-T out of the 2-point.

Joe Daniel: No way. Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. But we found that as long as our guys will get their hip level down in their 2-point stance, their blocking isn’t really any different than a 3-point stance. And that probably goes to the weight room and we work in the weight room at being in that position and getting strong in that position. Our varsity allow it. This is the first year we went into the 2-point. I think it helped them have vision on the zone. It helped them on their pass sets, certainly. I think it helped with their communication ’cause their up. Our JV’s who don’t have as much. Our JV’s and our freshmen who haven’t spent as much time in the weight room, we ended up putting them on the 3 just to get their level down but that helped a lot with their zone blocking. I’m sure, Wing-T, you can use a little quick, smaller lineman in there, I would guess.

Nate Albaugh: Yeah, I think there’s always different schools of thoughts. There’s different ways to run it. So I guess you never know what. In my book, honestly, you get what you get and usually at any high school I’ve been in, I’ve been at very big ones, I’ve been in very small ones, your best five linemen stand out pretty quickly and you just kind of take whatever size they are. So some years, you’ve got a couple of really big ones. Some years, you got some smaller ones. But honestly, in my 11 years coaching, I’ve seen you always have a little bit, but not a whole lot of tough decisions when it comes to choosing your best lineman.

Joe Daniel: Right. Yeah I mean those guys are going to stand out. There’s no question about that. It takes a certain type of guy to play that position and I’m glad that I coach it. I don’t know how much of a wide receiver coach I would be. But I’m definitely, I like coaching these guys and they do. You’re able to tell who they are no matter what system we’ve been power countering, of coaching Wing-T, veer, they show themselves when they think you’re right.

Nate Albaugh: Now my question is: As you grow up in football and you start to learn about, you read books, and you start learning about the history of the game a little bit. I think the common, the most common thing here on offensive line is that the easiest block, the easiest block in football is a down block, am I right? I mean that’s what you’re always taught.

Joe Daniel: That’s what’s supposed to be, yeah.

Nate Albaugh: So to me, as I look at zone, because the first thing I do when I draw this up is I start preparing for us talking and I am drawing up zone and I’m looking at it and I going “Right, what’s the idea here? Why are people running this? So by my look at it, you’re really just down blocking, but you’re down blocking at the play rather than away from the play. I mean really, is that what we’re getting?

Joe Daniel: Somewhat, we want to get squared up. So we’re not going to down block him and drive him. And we’re actually horrible at down blocking. If I’d look back at teams where we’ve been a gap blocking team, when we got to down block, you know we’re just not good at it so we’ll zone block most of our stuff. So I think the easiest block is down blocking because that’s what you do all the time if that’s the system that you’re in. We’re going to step and try to get our hat on the play side number of that defender and then we want to get square. One of the best things that we hammer on is keeping your shoulders square. We don’t care if you drive him vertical. We don’t care if you take him anywhere. Don’t let him get penetration. Cover him up and, again, let the back read it. And if he wants to run to the play side, then we’ll keep going with him because we know that backs going to have that lane open up behind him.

Nate Albaugh: Now, you talking inside zone right now?

Joe Daniel: Yeah, inside zone. But you know those linemen will run anywhere that they, sometimes they’ll run as a reacher. You know, they’ll get different reads off of the zone step. Obviously, they’re expecting zone out of us but we’re going to take him, outside zone we’re going to take them wherever they want to go but inside zone, we’re going to try to just cover them up.

Nate Albaugh: Now, do you guys step to a double team? You were mentioning the two ways earlier. What scheme do you guys use? Do you guys step to the double team and step off or do you guys like more of the Tony Franklin system, trying to avoid the double team?

Joe Daniel: We primarily are trying to get into the double team when we run. And part of the thing with, I don’t know with Tony Franklin system and other offenses, my understanding is that when they are stepping and just stepping and going, part of that is the hurry-up aspect of it. In that, you’re not having to worry as much about the double team because you’re going very fast and they have no idea what’s coming. So if we run a hurry-up, sometimes when we get a big play we’ll just run to the ball and run our zone read right away. Try to catch the offense off-guard. When we do that, we don’t have time to communicate so we’ll just step and go because there’s a lot of communication involved in the double team part of it.

Alright coach, I think we’ve talked about that for a lot longer than I thought we were going to. So it’s our first time doing it so it’s a lot if fun. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about ChiefPigskin.com?

Nate Albaugh: Well, I started ChiefPigskin.com about 3 years ago or so and I got, well it’s been 4 years now that I got my first head coaching job and I’ve had some assistants I want to get them some materials and I started looking to buy some stuffs and I ran out of money real fast, video-wise. So I thought, there’s got to be an easier way or a cheaper way to do this and as I kind of start wracking my brain I came up with ChiefPigskin.com and now I travel around and visit coaches that I knew to start with and I started spreading my wings a little bit and each coach shared a little bit and a couple years later here we’re sitting with over 300 videos, 303 videos for coaches’ use as resources. You know, we’re running a little problem right now. It’s either I have to give it up or I have to figure out a way for it to make money. It’s been a great project; it’s been good to me. As a coach, I’ve learned so much. I’ve made so many contacts, so many great resources and these things for coaches to learn when they get on to ChiefPigskin.com. It’s been fantastic. It’s just a tough spot for me now. I got to make some decisions. It’s either I’ve got to make some money or I have to just let it ride and let it sit as it is now. So that’s how I got on the ChiefPigskin and I’ve been running it and just learning how to build the site on my own. A lot of hard work, a lot of sweat, a lot of tears, but a real cool project. Now that’s all said and done.

Joe Daniel: You answered really great. I remember the first time that I saw it, I was just amazed how much is on there. Sometimes, I’ll pop over there just anytime that I’m trying to learn something new, I’ll pop over there and look for a video and usually find it. It’s a really good site.

As far as I’ve run Football-Defense.com, if anybody’s interested, you can go over there and there’s a free 3-5-3 video series available that you can download. That site’s been up probably the same amount of time – 3 years. We’ve got about 220 posts on there. So check that out as well.

I enjoyed it coach. We’ll do this again real soon.

Nate Albaugh: Absolutely, looking forward to it.

Joe Daniel: Thanks for listening to the football coaching podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes to get the latest episodes and leave a review for us as well. You can find out more at joedanielfootball.com.