Zone Blitz Cookbook by The Vaguely Plausible National Football League

The
VAGUELY PLAUSIBLE
National Football League
--Zone Blitz Cookbook--

FBPro users have long wished that they could drop defensive linemen into pass coverage. After all, this has been going on in real football for years, and teams like Pittsburgh, Carolina, Cincinnati and even Green Bay and New England have made it a feature of their defensive schemes.

Well, guess what? It turns out you can do it after all. The method was independently discovered by FCivish and others who reported their findings on the Sierra FBPro discussion board. What follows is

How do I do it?
Is it worth it?

How to Drop DL Into Real Pass Coverage

The following assumes a DE will cover a short zone. If you assign Read and If Pass . . . logic to a DL be sure to put the If Pass . . . instruction at the beginning of his logic set, before Read or Move To commands. Otherwise you may crash the practice editor and quite possibly a game too.

Load your formation of choice.

Set the play editor to After Snap logic. Figure out where you want the DL's zone to be. Assume it is DE1 you want to drop into coverage.

Assign that zone to the nearest linebacker to your DL. Assume it's LB1.

Right-click on DE1 and choose Substitute.

On the Substitution Screen, choose LB1. You will get the warning, Logic for this player will be erased. Be brave.

After the substitution, LB1 is where DE1 was and vice verse. LB1 has no logic. BUT

Click on DE1 in his new position and he does have logic, the zone defense logic you assigned to LB1! Logic for the position you click is erased, logic for the unclicked position is left intact. Cool, huh?

Now set the play editor to Before Snap.

Slide LB1 and DE1 back to their appropriate places.

Return to After Snap logic.

Assign whatever logic you want LB1 to have, presumably some kind of pass rush.

Assign logic to the rest of your defenders.

What makes the whole thing work is the fact that Sierra now allows you to "swap" players on the field in the play editor without first having to bench one of them, as you did in FB96. Fortunately for us, they didn't "fix" the fact that this provides a way to get linemen into pass coverage.

Keep in mind that you must substitute for the proper player, otherwise you erase the coverage logic and have to start over.
Read logic will work in combination with If Pass . . . logic, but observe the following precautions:
1. Put IF (Pass/Run) Logic first. Delaying If Pass can crash the game.
2. Assign Read logic to the LB before subbing the DL back in. Believe it or not it makes a difference -- if you sub the DL back and then assign Read logic you get a "DL Read" regardless of the Pass" instructions.
3. Early published versions of this page said Read and If Pass . . . logic assigned to a DL would crash the practice field. Further testing shows that this is only a problem if the If Pass . . . instructions are delayed. Use If Pass . . . before any Move To, Read, or Stop & Wait logic.
Sorry, we checked: doing it the opposite way (assigning logic to the DL and subbing the LB) will not get linebackers to drop into a down stance. Don't we wish.

Is It Worth It?

This is a very good question. NFL teams use zone blitzes to mess up the offense's "hot read." If there is a blitz from one side, a receiver on that side is supposed to break off his route and run to the spot the blitzers would normally be covering. The QB is supposed to read the blitz and hit the hot read, who has generally adjusted his pattern to a slant or turn-in. The DL zone isn't even a "real" zone -- it's just to get a body in the path of the hot receiver.

Needless to say, there are no hot receivers in FBPro.

Actually, the Dark Side still hopes to find a way to create hot reads, but we haven't yet. So it's an open question what good a zone blitz scheme is in FBPro, aside from novelty value and the chance to make some plays look more like what an NFL team would run. Here's what we have seen and what we conjecture:

If you can actually get the DL into the catch circle with the receiver, his high ST gives him a good chance to frustrate the catch, particularly in leagues like the VPNFL or John Frisby's NFL66-Plus where ST ratings are not out of whack by position.

The DL might pick up a receiver for long enough that the QB considers him "covered" and looks elsewhere. By the time the receiver sheds the DL, the QB no longer cares. (And hopefully the receiver will be picked up by another zone defender.)

If you play in one of those leagues where DL are as fast as halfbacks, hey! Have fun.

Sometimes an overzealous OL will chase after the DL as he drops. Presto: instant ineligible man penalty.

Given the mania for comeback patterns in remote leagues, the DL's inability to stay with a fast receiver could be an asset. He could catch up just as the receiver is coming back for the ball.

DL dropping with Read and If Pass . . . logic may be better comeback pass defenders than speedier linebackers. Those LBs drop deep in a hurry.

The zone blitz plays we have seen are very vulnerable to inside runs on the dropping DL's side. We recommend that you use the Dark Side profile system or a similar way to make sure that your zone blitz plays don't get called on running downs.