i love it when we get viewer questions about x's and o's today we're talking about how to beat cover two i'm gonna show you some cover two beaters coming up right now [Music] hey everybody welcome to lead athletes tv i'm mike polovsky former 11 year pro quarterback and quarterbacks coach here at eliteathletestv.com today we're going to talk about how you beat cover 2. now we've done a video on cover 2 before back when we very first started this channel and i will put a card up here so you can go check that out and we talked about a couple of the concepts that you use to beat cover 2. today i got a question from morrow green who just simply asked can you make a video on how to beat cover 2 well yes mauro i can do that for you before we get started here if you haven't done so yet you're new to the channel subscribe and ring that bell get notified every time we have new stuff coming out that can help you improve your game give me a thumbs up if you're ready to learn about cover 2 and leave me a comment down below love to hear from you i'd love to hear your thoughts on cover 2 or any other coverage or ask me a question i'd be happy to answer it here in video lastly make sure you share this video out family friends teammates fans anybody who likes football content or anybody who needs to improve their game we're trying to help as many people as we can by doing these videos that's why i do them so the more you share it out more people i can help now let's talk about cover two when i was young i hated throwing into cover two because cover two is designed to take away the underneath routes the best friend of a defense in cover two is time and distance i'll show you what i mean in just a second we'll draw it up for you but they are counting on time and distance to help them get to the quarterback the longer you hold the ball more likely it is that they get home with their pass rush now the other thing is it's hard to make a living in underneath routes and cover two there's five guys underneath and so it's hard to make a living finding tight windows underneath so you have to push the ball vertical that's another thing as a young quarterback pushing that ball vertical can be scary at times but once you learn how to throw that ball vertical and use those vertical routes in the end every zone becomes man to man as a zone defender if a man comes through your zone you have to lock on and play him as he comes through so the trick is in cover two to get a stretch on one guy you do that by outnumbering him so you can do it two on one or you can get the numbers advantage by going three on two let's hit the board i'll show you what i'm talking about since the ton of high school teams are playing two by two set shotgun quarterback let's start in that two by two and so this is ten personnel one running back no tight ends and you're getting a straight cover two again i'll talk about cover two real quick here old school cover two corners are forcing the inside release trying to funnel these receivers inside to the safety both safeties have deep halves and will linebacker is hook to curl mike lionbecker is dead hook sam is hooked to curl he's got that area corners after forcing that inside release are flat defenders so what does that leave you on the field you have to divide it as a quarterback into where your open spaces are in this case what you get is that deep middle deep outside alleys and then depending on linebacker drops you'll either get this lane behind the linebackers or this shallow cross lane here so that's where your holes are you can count them up it's one two three four five guys underneath so all of these windows get pretty tight now you can simply and i'll run through some quick concepts here you can run stuff like double slant you could run slants against this if this will linebacker jumps outside you hit this quick slant inside if the wheel linebacker gets walled or stays inside you can hit this slant off of that inside release so stuff like that is okay but i don't really love any part of the quick game against cover two here's what i was talking about you want to get a two on one somewhere in this zone and you want to do it if you can vertically so a couple simple plays i drew up before but i'll draw them up for you again real quick is to go three vert against cover two now what you've done is you've hit all of those open spaces in the alleys and down the middle of the field as a quarterback you're going to pick a side and it can be based on personnel it can be based on where you have your running back checkdown going to but you pick a side and you want to work that safety so let's say in this case we're going to run a shallow here to hold these backers so we can get vertical through and i'm going to pick since we're bringing that middle through from the left hand side the free safety if he takes that middle on three vert i'm going to hit the alley if he stays wide i can drop a dime right down the middle of the field throw that thing straight on the line just clear the linebackers and get a big completion down the middle of the field this ball will always be completed somewhere between 18 to 22 down the middle of the field you can stretch it just a little bit down the sideline but not much somewhere between 18 to 24 but once you get to 24 you're kind of risking it because as i said it's time and distance the longer the throw for a quarterback the more time safeties have to come over and react and make a play so that is three vertical standard cover two beater they've been running it since the dawn of football now what else can you do smash routes where you try to take advantage of this corner over the top you expect your receiver to beat the safety and take the proper angle coming out of it and you hold this corner with a smash if he sits on the smash route you've got a whole shot in here to your corner route if he gets depth pedals out now you hit your smash underneath simple reads high low again high low reads are as old as a passing game if you like your match ups on the inside say you have good slot receivers here on your team and they're trying to force that hard inside release what you can do is create a mandatory outside release for your outside receivers corners will get tangled up with that as they outside release and you can work the option game in here if the backer jumps over the top it's a quick sit down you hit him with the ball same idea over here with the sandbacker he has the option of this kind of anchor here he can run hooks just pressure releasing off the backer or he can get a little bit of width but you still have to be careful of that corner now what some teams have gone to is they have run flood type patterns trying to attack vertically again trying to put two on one i also talked about numbers so if you're in a two by two here one of the things you can do is you can come back with that simple smash route and then bring h across on the back side now if that free safety jumps this jumps the corner and cornerstone smash you've got this shot to your h receiver if the safety stays home and the corner sits now you can throw that corner if the safety stays home and the corner gets depth now you can throw your smash route to the outside so it's a simple three on two here you're working your three guys one two three on their two and you're trying to find the open space that they leave over so that's two by two pretty standard formation a lot of teams run it now let's take a look at a different formation let's go out of a trips formation a three by one and see what kind of fun games we can play against cover two from that look now you've got three by one once again we're trying to get a two-on-one somewhere within a zone make one man have to cover two so once again three by one you can still run that smash boom corner go route make that safety defend these two high routes take the same concept you could run smash with a scissors concept same idea trying to force this safety to cover two guys as they come through his zone if the corner falls off you've always got your check down in the flat so you can see pretty consistent pretty repetitive in terms of the type of routes and type of things that you can do versus cover two now here's a change up for you let's stop attacking safeties for a second and let's go after linebackers so you want to run some kind of route that attacks linebackers what are you going to do well you're going to get them with a high low stretch you could do something to the effect of an over with a shallow make these linebackers choose whether they're going to drop into hooks or they're going to cover that shallow underneath then as a quarterback you find your windows generally you hit this one after it gets across the ball so somewhere over here but they either have to react up and attack the shallow or they have to cover that dig behind and you can always to make sure you keep that safety off run that receiver through to hold him another way of doing it would be kind of a dagger concept running vertical through clearing that safety and running the deep over here behind the linebacker's drops now you have something where linebackers if they do drop all the way for depth they getting super deep now you can just check down with your running back so once again running safety off he has to cover that when it comes to his own and you have your deep cross basic whatever you want to call that route with a check down you could also check shallow with that back to give that same high-low read inside you can mix and match these route combinations anywhere across the board here you could give yourself a shake route with a vertical with a chute you could run shake route post route with a shoot anything like that where you're putting two guys through that vertical zone on the safety and having something to hold that corner in the flat that way you can play two on one up here and high low with the corner so you say coach we don't run four wides we use a tight end in the game ah i got something for you there too especially if you like to run the football if your team's good at running the ball then play action comes into it and makes it really fun to work on cover two let's take a look so now here we are we've got the dreaded tight end in the game and we're switching sides for the formation just for fun what if with the tight end in the game now you're gonna run play action so quarterback gives the fake nice three plus step drop out here and you can run outside receiver on the go tight end on the corner and a slot on a shallow now you could do this you could put them in motion bring them across to get them across the formation quicker too this corner as everything vacates and he sees y get vertical if their pattern reading is probably going to drop off to help this will likely be open if he collapses and sits on the shallow now you've got a nice hole shot to your tight end coming out into the corner route and if the safety jumps the corner now you've got to go over the top so once again you've got three on two out there to the outside and it makes it a nice easy read for quarterbacks how about one more for you been drawing that corner over and over as you can see it's a pretty good cover two beater but what if you were to run the shake with a climb and a sit get him outside that backer zone have him find a window to the outside this corner with nobody to follow in he may drop off if this safety comes over the top you've got a shot here the safety stays home you've got a shot in the corner so as you can see there's a million options in cover too and i drew up maybe 10 of the plays that have been designed to beat cover two but there's a bunch of different ways to attack it what you want to remember is distance how far you have to throw the ball and time how long you have to hold that ball in order to throw it are the defense's friends as a quarterback understanding cover two and having a play that beats cover two and where exactly your key is are your friend know your reads make your throws be quick about it and you'll be effective versus cover two morrow i hope that answered some of your questions trying to get you kind of a quick synopsis of how to beat cover two if you like what i did here today make sure you subscribe to the channel ring that bell that way you get notified every time we have new stuff coming out give me a thumbs up if you feel better about beating cover two and leave a comment down below love to hear from you your thoughts on cover two always cool to see guys draw plays or send in plays that they love versus cover too i always like learning a new offense myself appreciate you watching trying to improve your quarterback training some football skills hopefully improve your football iq and make you a better player i'll talk to you again soon