Sunday, September 12, 2004

All hail the 3-4

This is my favorite kind of football article, one that talks schemes and theories and so forth. One of the evils of fantasy football is that the game forces the fans to see more individualism on the field. Overall that's balanced only by the good of video-game football: Madden players learn the different schemes and theories and so forth. Or so I guess. I haven't played Madden since 1991. Can you still score every time with the screen pass?

A few paragraphs for the scrapbook:

It was the Patriots who helped spawn the 3-4 comeback by using it last season on the way to a Super Bowl victory. But no one has had more continued success with the 3-4 defense than Bill Cowher, who installed it when he became Steelers coach in 1992, carrying on a tradition that Chuck Noll started when he broke up his old Steel Curtain and switched to the 3-4 in 1983.

"Obviously Pittsburgh has played it forever," Turner said. "It takes some pressure off your defensive line. You can create more problems for an offensive football team and you can present more looks, which Pittsburgh has done to people forever."

Cowher's defenses ranked in the league's top 10 nine times in the past 11 seasons, including No. 1 in 2001 when the Steelers went 13-3 and reached the AFC championship game. Besides Cowher, no coach embraces the defense more enthusiastically than his coordinator, Dick LeBeau.

"It gives you more team speed and gives you four 240-pound men who can run who are in 2-point stances," LeBeau said. "And they can also see, so you can do a few more things with them, you can make more adjustments because they're standing up and watching, as opposed to the four down linemen in a 3-point stance and you have to convey all the changes to him down there."

In a semi-related note, what do you think, should I shell out 20 bucks for the PG's Insider package?

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