How to Position the Linebackers 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 the importance of lining up our linebackers in the 4-3 set. Now the reason we run a 4-3 defense, or what it means is, we've got 4 down linemen, and their job is to get the first initial push. The second line of defense in the middle of the field is going to go to these linebackers. Our linebackers have to be very aggressive and very athletic guys because they've got a lot of room to cover. Let me go ahead and show you the positioning and what our linebackers are. This is going to be our same linebacker or our strong side linebacker. He's on the strong side of the field, they've got a tight end lined up over here. And so this is going to be our strong end. This guy is going to be responsible for covering the outside gaps. He's also going to have to come up and cover anything that's coming to the outside past our defensive ends. The other guy is going to be our will linebacker, or our weak side linebacker. This guy is also going to have similar responsibilities. He's got outside gap, we can shift these guys in to cover an inside gap, if we shift our line at any point and time. Which we'll talk about a little bit later. But one important job goes to this guy, this is our middle linebacker. The middle linebacker is usually going to call out a lot of the defensive plays. He's usually going to be the defensive captain. And this guys got to come up and make stops in the middle of the field and contain all of this area out here. So these linebackers are very important in the 4-3 scheme."