I feel the need to post something about the off coverage. It seems there is a majority that hate that we play off coverage so much and want to blame the off coverage for all the passing yards given up. To clarify, most of ATL's yards came in the 2nd half, mostly, in the 4th quarter. We played exclusively with off coverage the entire first half. The 2nd half is when we started integrating more press coverage.
The biggest difference was that Roddy White became a beast in the 2nd half and it didn't matter what we did to him, he still caught balls.
bear with all the pictures, but, I have to show a lot of different plays:
Here we're playing a cover 3 zone, with Whitner responsible for the 2 receiver side flat route. It looks like Whitner took the inside receiver. Rogers has to play off coverage because he has to take the deepest man in his 3rd, that could be White, it could be the inside receiver, he has to play off to cover both.
I don't think we're supposed to have 3 defenders on 2 guys in that part of the field, I think Whitner should've taken the flat responsibility, either him or Brooks blew their coverage which gave White the catch.
We play off Roddy again, this time they run a play action fake and throw it on a deep post.
The off coverage allows Brock to stay tight on the deep route
Ryan makes a good throw and White makes a good catch, didn't matter what defense we ran, they executed perfectly
We play off coverage again. This time White runs a curl route.
We're running cover 3 again, this time I think it's Willis who is held out of the flat because of the 2 inside receivers. Brock does jump the route aggressively(what I was talking about earlier, he wasn't the only one).
You see how close Brock was to jumping on the route, but, White does an excellent job of shielding the defender from the ball.
Here we play press coverage, White again runs a curl route.
Brock tries to get a jam but White dismisses his jam
in the end, Brock is pretty much in the same position as off coverage, and White does a good job of shielding from the defender again.
This was the critical 4th and 2 that ATL converted, we're playing press coverage on White again.
White makes a move on the defender and is able to create seperation
White again shield the defender from the ball.
And then the pick at the stick the off coverage allows Brock to jump on the route.
It was a lot more than simply, "pressing" the receivers to keep them from catching those short passes. I think a lot of us think we should just do what Seattle does and press every play, but that's not the style of defense we run. We're still in the top 3 in the league in points allowed - it's obviously working.