high-low

Whatever you do, #44, it is wrong.

Iowa runs a base Cover 2 defense, and Michigan has been adding lots of Cover 2 to their Cover 1/Cover 3 base. Meanwhile Iowa’s offensive coordinator, Greg Davis, is well known for favoring a simple, West Coast-style passing offense that creates easy reads and, at the very least, open receivers underneath to dump it to.

All of that means it’s a good week to discuss a defensive concept we haven’t gone over in so long that the quarterback’s targets last time were Roy Roundtree and Martavious Odoms: a High-Low read.

If you’re a football guy already you can almost certainly tune this one out. If you’re not, this is a really easy thing to see on the field that can make you sound knowledgeable when you point it out to your friends.

High-Low Defined

This is an offensive passing concept that gives the quarterback two routes that cross above and below a defender’s zone, close enough to stay in view but vertically spaced enough (12-15 yards) that the flat defender can’t cover either by splitting the difference. The quarterback then throws whichever route the high-low’d defender covered.

I say “flat defender” instead of “cornerback” because it’s not always a CB who has that zone.

[After THE JUMP: lots of ways to stretch a man’s zone.]