Developing Championship Defensive Backs (15 pages, PDF)

Developing Championship Defensive Backs is the digitised edition of the printed Gridiron Strategies Special Coaching Report of the same name — 15 pages on building a secondary that can hold up against sophisticated passing attacks and multi-dimensional offenses. The report's premise, stated on page one, is that it takes more than just speed and desire to build a dynamic defensive back: the fundamentals have to be taught, the coverage rules have to be memorised, and the drills have to be run. Most of the report is written by Hank Schrader, defensive coordinator at Westbury High School in Houston, Texas, with contributions from three other coaches. It takes you from stance and backpedal through zone, man-to-man and bump-and-run coverage rules, into special techniques for a superstar receiver, and finishes with three separate drill sections — 20 drills in all, most of them diagrammed.

What's inside

• DB fundamentals — the 13 basics of coverage play (Hank Schrader). Mental toughness, stance, bump stance, backpedalling, playing the ball, recognising patterns and driving angles, planting and driving, transition moves, the speed turn, breaking up the pass, block protection, defending the run and tackling — each broken into specific coaching points (chin over the toes, weight on the balls of the feet, never cross the feet, turn and run once the receiver breaks the three-yard cushion).
• Block protection: shedding four types of blocks. A dedicated box giving the defensive back's responsibilities against the chop block, the kick-out block, the stalk block by a receiver and the crack block — including the "Crack! Crack! Crack!" call and pressing the line of scrimmage to shrink the crack-block angle.
• Run support and tackling. The five run-responsibility terms — force/contain, replace, pursuit, hold and fill (cutback) — with the gap each one covers and the force man's four-to-five-yard point of aim. Then tackling fundamentals, open-field tackling, angle-tackling technique and the responsibilities of the last man who can make the tackle.
• Zone coverage: communication and providing help are musts. Zone advantages and disadvantages (seams, deep-short gaps, flood routes, delay patterns, free releases); the four quarterback indicators — eyes, front shoulder, non-passing arm, ball release; a 12-call list of visual alerts and verbal commands from "Pass!" and "Crack!" to "Screen!", "Cross!" and "Ice!"; the three pattern-recognition rules built on the recognition point and the interception point; a one-to-five receiver numbering system from the widest side of the field with each defender's responsibility; and 21 zone coverage keys for your defensive backs to memorise.
• Cover responsibilities for specific zone defenses. A position-by-position chart — strong corner, strong safety, Mike, Will, contain end, weak corner, free safety — for Cover 3, Cover 2, Cover 2 Shadow, Cover 4 and Cover 5, giving each player's zone and his primary and secondary receiver.
• Man-to-man coverage: winning the 1-on-1 battle. 21 rules, starting with the seven questions every defensive back answers before the snap. Includes the cushion numbers (three to five yards vertical, two to three yards horizontal), how to defend the three route classes (quick three-step, intermediate eight to twelve yards, deep rounded cuts at eighteen to twenty-four yards), tightening coverage on a blitz, handling pick plays against slot sets, and the split-based alignment rule at ten yards.
• Bump-and-run coverage: not getting beat deep. 15 rules plus the four advantages bump-and-run gives your defense. Covers the hand shiver and countering move, and the three techniques — tight-inside press, tight-outside press and trail technique — inside the five-yard legal contact area.
• Solid pointers for defensive backs (Van Malone, former Detroit Lions defensive back and assistant coach at North Dakota State University). Seven coaching points written for the players themselves, which the report invites you to photocopy and hand out to your secondary.
• Special techniques: containing the superstar receiver. Six answers to a receiver or formation you cannot handle conventionally — the bracket (2-on-1) technique, the bunch technique for trips inside two or three yards, the 26 technique for a normally spaced trips set, combo coverage for twins and wing sets, the slide technique for disguising coverage, and the collision technique against the three-step game.
• Skill-building drills (Schrader). Six drills to get cover men game-ready: the "W" drill, form tackling, the tip drill, the double-block drill, the hash drill and the divide drill, with safety notes on how hard to run them.
• Teaching techniques: critical keys (Tom Bass, 30-year NFL and college coach, president of the World Federation of American Football). Three points of pattern reaction and the distance rule behind them — the ball is caught roughly six yards from the recognition point on inside patterns coming toward the ball and about ten yards away on patterns going away from it — taught through diagrammed short-area, medium-area and deep-area pattern reaction drills.
• Backfield-building drills (Bob Pieper, head football coach, Glenbrook North High School, Northbrook, Ill.). Backpedal coaching points including "nose over toes", then 11 diagrammed drills: backpedal, backpedal and flip, the "W" drill, 45-degree pass, one-man sled, angle tackling, man-to-man fades, 90-degree break, partner tip, strip drill and fumble recovery.

Who it is for

Defensive coordinators, secondary coaches and defensive backs coaches who want a teaching progression rather than a scheme. The contributing coaches come from high school, college and the NFL — a high school defensive coordinator, a high school head coach, a former NFL defensive back then coaching in college, and a 30-year NFL and college coach — and the material is pitched at the level where fundamentals are still being installed, so it reads naturally for high school and youth staffs and works as a refresher at the college level. It is coverage-agnostic: the fundamentals, block protection, tackling and drill work drop into any defensive system, and the cover-responsibility chart is a straight reference for anyone running Cover 2, 3, 4 or 5. Head coaches with no dedicated secondary coach will get the most out of it, since it is the one-man install manual for the position.

This is a digitised edition of the printed Special Coaching Report — 15 pages, delivered as a single PDF with a searchable text layer and bookmarked by section, so you can search a term like "crack block" or jump straight to the drills. It is a written report with coaching diagrams, not a video and not a playbook of plays.