There has been a lot of discussion about scoring being down due to more defenses playing 2 high and not giving up the big play, but I listened to a podcast the other day where a high school coach talked about some of the new techniques, defensive fronts, teams are using to combat the zone blocking scheme that may also be contributing. I believe he called it a "tight front" and it's concept is to not let the o-lineman to be able to combo block and get to ILBers. While the concept is nothing new, he said the way they are doing it is. The host of the podcast said that by his count 13 current teams have coaches from the "Shannahan tree" and employ the scheme. Said that when he looked at these offenses using the criteria of ; yards gained, points scored, turnovers committed, and averaged them, they would rank 18th in the NFL compared to the stats of the 32 teams. The coach said the way to combat the defensive front was to run traps and pull o-lineman. He said he saw the Packers pull Myers once last week and we gained 5 yards, but never went back to it. Some interesting discussion about whether the league has caught up to this style of offense.
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