Hogs Haven
A collection of articles, podcasts & tweets from around the web to keep you in touch with the Commanders, the NFC East, the NFL and sports in general, and a sprinkling of other stuff
Breaking down the different variations of man coverages that the Commanders like to use
In the comments section of my Commanders training camp round up post, one of my readers alerted me to a recent Take Command podcast episode. In that episode, former Washington tight end Logan Paulsen was complimenting the play of the Commanders secondary in the early days of camp. Paulsen noted that there were some obvious caveats: at that point it was only a few days into camp, no pads were on yet, Terry McLaurin was holding out and Noah Brown was being slowly ramped up so not practicing every day. But even with those advantages, Paulsen said the secondary was worthy of praise for their performances so far.
But what was really of interest was when host Craig Hoffman asked Paulsen how much of the success that the secondary was having was in man coverage and how much was in zone? Paulsen replied: “A lot of man coverage, like just straight 1-Plug, 1-Lurk, 1-Rat.” The commenter on my post that alerted me to this podcast asked what all those terms meant, so I thought we could go through the different variations of man coverage that the Commanders use and what those terms mean.
Before getting into each specific coverage, it’s worth noting that all of these coverages are very similar and some are just slight variations, but they all build into a package of coverages to keep the offense honest.
Cover-1 Plug
Cover-1 Plug, often known as 1-Plug or 1-Hole is probably the most common version of Cover-1. It’s a variation built to help handle one of the biggest weaknesses of Cover-1: crossing routes. Crossing routes are notoriously hard to cover in pure man-to-man coverage because receivers often are given inside leverage and thus gain a step, at which point it becomes very hard for a defender to catch up. So to help combat that, the defense has a linebacker sit in a zone underneath and look for crossing routes.
While more than 500 D.C. residents passionately lobbied both for and against a new Commanders stadium, the proposed $3.8 billion project looks to be firmly on track.
The Council of the District of Columbia went deep into the night to hear from its constituents about the Commanders’ proposed $3.8 billion domed facility at the site of RFK Stadium, but the bill is on track for passage due in no small part to the political evolution of the council’s chairman.
The council began two days of hearings on legislation to build the stadium and redevelop the RFK property with about $1.1 billion in public...
