Someone mentioned a new(worse) era of quarterbacks in the NFL right now and it reminded me of a theory/analysis I read somewhere that was really interesting.
Basically, it went something like this(I’ll probably get this somewhat wrong):
Go back to the early 2000s and you had cover 2 gaining popularity on defense, especially productive with Tampa’s ‘Tampa 2’. As the NFL does, Tampa has a few dominant defensive years and everyone follows suit trying to copy them. Ignoring the fact that not every team has the defensive personnel to make cover 2 effective.
And what kind of QB play do you really want going against cover 2 defense? A pocket passer who can read the field, diagnose the coverage, and go through progressions to find the receiver who finds his way into a gap in the zone. Peyton Manning was already becoming well established in the league, but enter Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Phillip Rivers, etc. All fueled by drafting strategy, teams are looking for the next Peyton Manning.
This carries on for awhile, aided by a league that wants more offense, and you see the boom years up until the Seattle Seahawks show up and change the way teams things about defense again. They run a cover 3(I think, maybe it was cover 1?) defense which features a single high safety(Earl Thomas) and a strong safety that drops down closer to the line of scrimmage(Kam Chancellor, one the best run stopping safety of all time), this made them extremely stingy against the run and created a lot of QB pressure. This made it super hard for pocket passer style QBs to get anything going, not enough time to really survey the field and go through those progressions.
NFL again, being a copy cat league sees many teams adopt this defensive scheme in hopes to replicate their success. They succeed in some ways. We see pocket QBs start to become less effective. What IS effective though, is QBs that can salvage a broken play, QBs who thrive on escaping the pocket and extending the play and finding open receivers normally up the sidelines where Cover 3 is weakest. A few new QBs start to emerge as clear league leaders (Mahomes, Jackson, Allen), and now every team is trying to find the next Mahomes/Jackson/Allen in the draft.
There’s a challenge with cover 3 though. It requires a ridiculous amount of athleticism from your secondary. It worked perfectly for the Seahawks because they literally had HOF caliber players at free safety(Earl Thomas), strong safety(Kam Chancellor), CB(Richard Sherman), LB(Bobby Wagner), and a very strong front 4, all in their primes! Teams tried to copy their scheme, but what made that scheme so effective was the personnel. Mahomes comes into the league and just starts carving up leaky cover 3 secondaries and sets records while doing so.
Fast forward another almost 10 years and where are we? A lot of defenses have shifted back to a cover 2 style defense that is difficult for these mobile QBs to take advantage of. Offense appears down this year and even guys like Mahomes are not putting up big numbers like they were.
The problem? Teams have been trying to find the next Mahomes/Allen for the last 10 years and defenses have adjusted. Maybe the cycle will repeat itself and the pocket passer QB will reign supreme again.
It could be totally wrong, but it was a really interesting analysis based on the trends/copy-cat nature of the NFL. Also a great study in how uncreative a lot of NFL coaching staffs are. What made Tampa in the late 90s-early 2000s & Seattle in the mid 2010s great was partly their scheme, but mainly it was their personnel. They had absolutely stacked rosters that don’t come around very often, and their coaching staffs built their scheme around the individual skillsets. Cover 3 gets ROASTED by guys like Mahomes when you don’t have the best FS/SS/CB/MLB in the league all playing on the field at the same time, WITH a front 4 that gets consistent pressure.
