How to Follow a Defense in Football by Watching the Safeties

Video Transcript

"How you doing, I'm Ryan McCann and we're going to talk about how to follow a defense by watching the safeties. The safeties are the last line of defense in a defense. They are, there are usually two safeties, a free safety and a strong safety. Free safety is usually the very last line of defense. A strong safety is a pass coverage safety but is very supportive in the run, stopping the run. You can learn a lot by watching the safeties. As a quarterback you can pick out the safeties and they tell you a lot about what the defense is doing. If there is one safety in the middle, that means it is a cover 3 meaning there are 3 safeties or 3 defensive backs covering a third of the field. Now if there's 2 safeties up top, that means there's going to be 2 safeties or 2 defensive backs covering each a half of the field and that tells you a lot what's going on underneath and of course what's going on in the second half. If there's 2 safeties in the back, you want to expose their weaknesses which is in the middle and on the outsides because they've got to cover a half. Now if you put 3 guys running into those 3 spots, there's only 2 guys to cover 3 so it puts them into a little bit of a quandary. If there's 1 safety back, it means you got 3 guys going deep so what that means is a little more space underneath to pick apart the defense. While everybody is going to be watching the safeties, especially the quarterback and the wide receivers because that's going to dictate how they run their patterns and a lot of offensive patterns are option patterns meaning if the safety is inside, you go outside or if he's outside vice-versa. Usually these options are built into the play so if there is 2 safeties, the receiver is going to know I'm going to split the safeties down the middle. When you watch the safeties, they know that they can tell a lot what they're doing so they're going to disguise it a lot of the time. Sometimes they'll start with a 1 safety deep and then rotate right before the snap or rotate after the snap. So you don't just look at them before the snap of the ball, you got to really look at them and see what they're doing and they'll have a lot of tells. And that's why you watch safeties because you want to play it safe."