Simplifying the Zone Blitz

Today I am going to talk about our zone blitz package and some of the things that we do to simplify it for our kids. Over the last three seasons we have shifted our mentality from being a man blitz team to a zone blitz team. Our philosophy in doing this is to put as much pressure on the opposing quarterback as possible while at the same time putting our players in as safe of a situation as we can in the secondary. As with most blitz packages we try and have the ability to overload the offense’s protection from the strong side, weak side and up the middle. And we can do that and change very little in the secondary. Most of the zone blitzes that we employ are three deep, three under type blitzes. This gives you the ability to send five rushers and overload one side of the protection. Our base zone blitz is a field-oriented blitz where we send the free safety and mike LB (See Diagram 1).