Defending Four Verticals (Quarters Coverage)

[yourfavestoner]

Been seeing complaints in the pre-release (and really, I've seen this complaint for a few years now) about Four Verticals being unstoppable against most coverages and defensive plays.

Really, the only coverages that you can run against Four Verts is Cover 2 Man and Cover 4. Four Verts is DESIGNED to attack Cover 2 and 3. Cover 4 is NOT a Hail Mary defense, it was designed in RESPONSE to Four Verts. It's basically man coverage on the outside with the Safeties given a bunch of different reads/options.

In that same breath, 4 Verts isnt a Hail Mary play...it's a 4-deep horizontal stretch that's read inside/out and is meant to be thrown 12-16 yards downfield (generally). Most teams actually have WAY more options than 4 Verticals on the game, like Seam-Reads and Back-Shoulder cuts for the outside receivers based on the defense's leverage.

Remember, in this day and age, Air Raids teams will run 4 Verts 10-15 times a game. It's a base pass concept. Run Cover 4 and Cover 2 Man a lot and get used to tilting coverage to the Field (wide side) and manually using one of the safeties. Four Verticals isn't going away...in this game or in real life. The Safety's read is to take #2 vertical (seams) - if there is no vertical threat by the #2 WR, they are free to either bracket outside or Rob the MOF.

Should mention....Cover 6 is another option, but always make sure the Cover 2 side is to the Boundary (short side) and Cover 4 side is to the Field (Wide Side). Baltimore does a lot of their 4 man rush stuff (with Suggs as the blitzing fourth rusher) out of Cover 6.

Spread teams running 4 Verticals has completely changed defensive football - to the point where Pure Cover 2 is nothing more than a supplemental coverage used for change-ups. Indeed, look no further than Virginia Tech and Bud Foster. What was once a 4-4 Cover 2 Invert defense just a few years ago (FS playing Robber, both Corners responsible for deep halves) has evolved turned into a 4-2 Quarters defense the last few years.

4 Verticals will continue to be a huge, huge issue for the CPU defense to defend, it might be time to take out Cover 2 from the defensive playbooks. However, YOU should be calling defensive plays at all times knowing that 4 Verticals could be a threat.

More on Quarters coverage and how you should be playing it manually with the Safeties: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...d-nfl-defenses

[mrprice33]

Awesome post.

[RahKhem]

Great, great post here, this exactly what needs to be shown and understood. I'm sure the game has plenty of flaws, but post like these will help ensure the real flaws are exposed, not schematic deficiencies.

[fballturkey]

Great information.

[J-Unit40]

Finally! Someone gets it and posts about it instead of complaining.

Nice post. Smart Football has had some good write ups on this very topic.

[WipeOut464]

I'm curious to see if we'll ever get proper split coverages or read checks in NCAA/Madden. As it is now, Quarters is a faux-prevent and doesn't reflect it's real-life use. Eh, it's probably too complicated for non-sim/knowledgeable players anyway.

Whatever happened to drills? Not RTG-style play sims, but full position drills. Last-gen NCAA had them (and Madden still might for all I know) and I imagine they helped introduce newbies to the concepts and skills needed to play at a competent level. There's gotta be a significant percentage of players out there that would be more sim than cheese if they could properly learn how to play the game.

Despite being decidedly non-sim, NCAA's still got to be pretty unapproachable for people that don't have a good football knowledge base.

[PowerofRed25]

While all of this is accurate (and very useful) real life information, I think a lot of the defensive concepts you bring up aren't applicable to the game. The defensive players in the game don't "read" anything, they are told to go to a spot and defend it. The problem there is that they don't adjust to certain routes and they don't work in tandem with other defenders. All of the concepts listed require communication between defenders and just dynamic thinking that doesn't exist in the game.

That creates massive gaps in all zone defenses that are exploitable even when the play you called should defend the play the offense called. Guys just stand in their designed spot, regardless of alignment or what the WR is doing. In the case of Cover 4, the underneath coverage is horrendously designed and so you get huge gaps in the defense vertically behind the intermediate zones and in front of the deep quarters zones, in the 12-16 yard area you talked about.

In real life, the defenders would pattern read and the intermediate defenders would back pedal with the vertical threat until someone crossed their face, which wouldn't happen. That is meant to take away that 12-16 yard area between zones. In the game, the intermediate defenders aren't programmed to do that so you get massive gaps before the 4 deep even comes into play.

I'm not sure I'd get caught dead running Cover 4 as a base defense in this game. Too many gaping holes, not nearly enough AI programming for underneath coverages to understand what I am hoping it does. My experiences may be a bit different than the rest of you since 90% of my games are user v user, but there are problems translating the great information in the OP to on the NCAA field.

[Kaiser Wilhelm]

This leaves the real question, which is, does the counter to 4 verticals actually defend four verticals?