soxfan121 said:
Ryan is better in zone. Almost all the guys they brought in this off-season are better in zone. Almost all CBs are better in zone - seeing the field is easier than playing with your back to the QB.
Ryan's ball skills do excite me. If the pass rush forces poor throws, he can make plays. The security blanket of McCourty & Harmon deep - both guys with good or better ball skills - suggests that "bend, don't break" and ballhawking is back, and back big.
I've been debating responding to this because I don't want to steal from future ITP pieces, but I think you're right that we'll see more zone in 2015. Of course, some situations are going to dictate man coverage - teams probably run man-to-man 99% of the time on 3rd-and-6+, regardless of what their base defense is.
In general, zone requires less physical skill than man (pointing to your "almost all CBs are better in zone" statement) but there are more rules and awareness required. Man-to-man requires more physical skill but is more straightforward conceptually, which is why the Pats have had success throwing guys like Talib and Browner in with limited system experience. It's also worth noting that there are different kinds of zone defenses that require different skills - a Cover 2 corner has to be a strong run defender but doesn't need much deep speed, while a Cover 3 corner has to run well enough to defend the deep ball but doesn't have as many run responsibilities. And zone defenses can ultimately get complex and require a lot of man-to-mannish skills - Nick Saban is a big proponent of
pattern matching, where zone defenders anticipate and react to the receivers' formations and routes and pick them up accordingly in tight coverage similar to man defense (and sometimes with turning their backs to the QB).
soxfan121 said:
If the rush can force early throws, the secondary will make plays. If there's six seconds to survey the field, this secondary will look terrible.
Hell, this was true of the pass defense last year when they had one of the most stacked secondaries in the league.
soxfan121 said:
ETA: That they've worked out Ryan at safety a bit allows for lots of complex combos with McCourty, who can slide up to CB.
There's a great example of this in the Minnesota game last year that I wrote up
for ITP. Ryan's man (Cordarelle Patterson) goes in motion, and instead of trying to follow him across the formation, Ryan drops to FS with McCourty moving down from safety to pick up Patterson on the other side:
