How to Position the Linemen in a Football 4-3 Defense

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Sean Hobson for Expert Village. What we want to talk about right now, is when running a 4-3 defense, we want to talk about the proper positioning of our linebackers. Now the reason we call it a four three defense is because first of all you have 4 down linemen, and their initial job is going to be to go in and to try to get as deep as they can. Then we've got our three linebackers, which is the second line of defense in the middle of the field. So first of all we're going to start off here with our weak side linebacker, this is called the will linebacker. He's going to play to the outside, and we can either bring him up a little bit, we can cheat him out a little bit, or we can shift him this way a little bit. But his job is going to be to contain that outside gap as a linebacker. So that?s the will linebacker on that side. On this side we have the same linebacker or the strong side linebacker. This guy is going to also fill up the gaps on this side and have responsibilities of outside containment as well. And the very important job goes to this guy, the middle linebacker. This guy?s job is he's got to cover all of this area and a lot of times he's going to have to take on a lineman head on head. So he's got to be able to read and react. And he's got to take up all this space in the middle. These guys are very important in the 4-3 scheme."