I’m sure a lot of you already know the basics about the base pass coverages from things like Madden and TV announcers/analysts: cover 0, 1, 2, Tampa 2, cover 3, 4, etc. Something a lot of people bring up, however, but don’t really explain that much is pattern match zone. It’s a very integral part of pass defense at all levels, but is something that doesn’t get covered too often, so I wanted to give you guys a basic guide to this concept of pattern match zone.
For this first post, I’m just going to do a simple breakdown of the two, basic, single high safety pattern match concepts: cover 3 match (rip/liz) and cover 3 mable.