Defensive football is built around three core principles: align, assign, finish. I’ve called finish “pursue” in the past but I think finish better sums up the expectation. In order to finish you have to pursue, in order to pursue you don’t have to finish (see: the rest of this post).
Align
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Align means getting lined up right. If you watch Miami play, especially in the red zone, the defense rarely gets lined up 1- with any urgency and 2- with every gap accounted for.