zone blitz in high school

Coach

I think the zone blitz scheme works fine, and doesnt have to be complicated at all. I think the important thing is to realize early on who your best pass rushers are. For example, if your dline are on the slower side, you may want to emphasize having them occupy linemen and create open holes for the blitzing linebackers.

If its the opposite and your dline are your better pass rushers then your LBs, get more involved with stunting your dlineman or having them long stick into different gaps.

Come up a some blitzes, make them simple, figure out what you do well and what you dont, then rep, rep, rep.

If you are NOT a good zone coverage team, I would avoid cover 33 (3 under 3 deep). You can get into some cover 1 and still bring the same 5 in your bltiz.

Good luck and let me know if you need anything else.

I totally agree, and fell into that trap a couple years ago. I think that the predetermined way of thinking by a lot of coaches (and me at one point until I got smart) is that when you hear the term "zone blitz" it means that you have to drop d lineman into coverage or whatnot. I am not a fan of doing so, and I only had one zone blitz in my playbook that did so, and I only ran it against 2 teams that loved middle screen, so I basically sat my NG on the tail back up the middle with help behind.

My point being is that I think coaches fall into the trap of running zone blitzes so they can wow people and say "look, I drop lineman into coverage....cool huh?" I was that same way early on in my zone blitzing days (not that long ago either) until I analyzed our films and realized that we were only hitting on about 18% of our blitzes, which is horrible.

After eliminating the "cool" and simply putting our best rushers in the blitz game, our blitz percentage the last 3 years had been in the 70-75% success rate (result in a gain under 3 yards).