Originally posted by Dshearn:
Originally posted by Furlow:
Originally posted by Dshearn:
Originally posted by mayo49:
Originally posted by DRCHOWDER:
He's supposedly a DB guy, I'm hoping to see what he can do with our Dbs.
Maybe, not having them play 10 yards off every receiver. 
He appears to be polar opposite to what the 49ers did last year.
The 49ers cover passing windows by bracketing over the top with DBs and underneath with LBers and sometimes safeties, but they cover an area quiet often....
From what I have seen, Wilks zones are tight and they cover the player.
I saw a quote somewhere that he said we don't cover "grass", something the 49ers did a lot of last season.
So I expect you will get your wish.
For the record, I think Wilks is going to take risks. He has guys undercut routs a fair bit, someone is going to get burned eventually, but I do think 3rd and 7 is going to be safer under Wilks.
Please dear God let this be a true statement. I can't even remember how many times I've yelled that at the screen the past few seasons.
I might still have the tabs open on my home PC, ill link the articles if I can find them. It was only like 10 or so interviews and 10 or so YouTube videos that I found and only a few of them talk about this.
Yeah, Wilks absolutely said he is not a fan of covering grass....and yes..... Wilks is a low shoulder guru. It is the opposite of what we did last year.
There is good and there is bad to that. So it is not "better" all the time.
I rather liked our flat footed coverage last year for the most part. The idea is you wait as long as possible to move, and that gives your DL as much time to get in the QB's area before he can "read" the defense. Having a presence in the passing lanes screws up the WR's rout trees and causes miscommunication between the WR and the QB. It forced a ton of check downs this season and it clearly worked as a defensive principle. Of course we all saw what happened on 3rd and moderate distance, slow to move also mean slow to cover. That along with coverage confusion is the trade off to covering "grass".
There might be a modern fancy term these days for low shoulder coverage, but what I see in a lot of Wilks YouTube videos is the Defensive backs keying right at the break( IE the dipping--low-- shoulder) of the WR/TE/RB and coming across the offensive player. It is hella aggressive to be that tight on the ball and to break that hard, and it should in theory lead to a big uptick in interceptions and batted balls. It basically resembles fronting a player in Basketball. The down siding being biting on double moves and of course if you miss your giving up YAC most likely. With the way this defense swarms to the ball, it seems like a gamble worth using at times.
The big caveat to this, I have not watched tons of games, mostly YouTube stuff that has been curated to make a point, So I am hardly a Wilks expert or CB expert or any such thing ( full discloser I was a terrible CB and got moved to Linebacker, of course these days the just call pass interference "coverage"). I saw what the YouTubers wanted me to see, but even the very small sample size shows stuff we simply don't do very often.
Me personally, I am on the fence. What we saw last year worked on the large scale, but the down side to actually defending the ball is probably mitigated a ton by the talent on the defense. These guys swarm tackle. There is a ton of closing speed on this defense, and we already have a Linebacker you can leave on an island and one of the most instinctual SS in the entire league....plus the defense will likely get faster next year ( I expect we get a sideline to sideline FS from somewhere to meet Wilks needs) So going for the ball seems like a smart change to make.
About 'not covering grass', all teams pattern match nowadays so the entire concept of not covering grass isn't new, but how aggressive a defense is with pattern matching can vary. In my observation, the 49ers were not aggressive with pattern matching last season. I don't know if Moseley's injury and/or Huf's inexperience had anything to do with that. Perhaps Ryans and Undlin didn't have experience teaching it.
When Fangio was here, I thought he was on the aggressive side with pattern matching. Here is a good example that I found a long time ago, but I think it illustrates what I mean.
This frame here looks like Cover3. Or at least, the 49ers start off the play in some form of zone with 4 underneath, and 3 deep.
But looking at the last few frames of this gif, it looks like man coverage. This is aggressive pattern matching from a three deep shell.
