Acme Packing Company
Hafley builds on previous wrinkles to Packers Tampa-2 coverage scheme on third down.
The Packers blew out the 49ers 38-10 in Week 12 in a rematch of last year’s NFC Divisional round playoff game. The defense generated three turnovers (two fumble recoveries and an interception), giving the offense a short field on three drives where the offense scored three touchdowns. It was a sloppy game on both sides of the ball for the 49ers, who could not generate a single turnover and who missed multiple tackles, 21 to be exact.
In this game, the Packers defense faced an offense that was missing Brock Purdy due to a shoulder injury and elbow soreness on his throwing arm, which is also the arm he had surgically repaired after the 2022 season from an injury in the NFC Championship Game. The 49ers offense was also missing Trent Williams, though his replacement, Jaylon Moore, played well in Williams’s absence.
Also absent was Brandon Aiyuk (ACL) and Christian McCaffrey just came back to the lineup after their bye week. For as much injury as the 49ers were dealing with, they still had ample opportunity to do more than they did with backup quarterback Brandon Allen filling in for Purdy but Hafley’s unit got the best of them and did so by just playing their bread-and-butter concepts on third down versus the 49ers offense.
In this game specifically, Hafley unveiled a new wrinkle to Tampa-2: The corners bailed to the deep half, and a deep middle safety dropped to the middle zone. This was done to delay the quarterback’s processing and truly muddy up the post-snap picture for him.
To Kyle Shanahan’s credit, he had several play calls dialed up to beat Hafley’s disguised Tampa-2 coverages but Allen never looked comfortable executing the offense on third down with drives ending with a fumble, which he recovered, an interception, and multiple plays where took the checkdown, scrambled, or threw incomplete.
First play
On this play on the 49ers first drive of the game, Shanahan, anticipating Tampa-2, called a pass concept that could stress the horizontal coverage of the underneath defenders in the intermediate area.
The play is an all-curl concept, with quarterback Brandon Allen reading the progression from Ricky Pearsall’s over-the-ball route to the deep swirl route from Deebo on the left to the flat checkdown. If the ball is thrown on time, it would go to Pearsall first in the hole in the underneath middle of the Tampa-2 zone.
This is another new wrinkle in Hafley’s arsenal, sending a 4th rusher from the linebacker position, dropping to the two defenders on the line of scrimmage to the right to underneath zones in Tampa-2, and having both corners bail to the deep half.
Above are the post-snap zone drops from the defense. Safety Xavier McKinney becomes the Tampa-2 deep middle zone pole runner.
Allen drops back but the coverage rotation speeds up his processing just a bit too much and he doesn’t take the throw to Pearsall....
