QB Secondary Recognition

You watch the safeties. After awhile it is not so hard to see what they are doing post-snap (though still can be tricky at times).

Group them into families. Cover 1 and 3 are together, 2 and 4 are together. You can tell the difference between 1 and 3 from the cornerbacks. 2 and 4 is typically the width of the safeties, if they are inside the hash, it is probably 4, if they are on the hash or outside, probably two.

Typically for a HS kid ask him to watch the rotation of the weak-safety, have him throw away from the rotation. More advanced kids you watch the strong safety and weak safety in tandem. What they do tells you A LOT. If they start even and move to one in front of the other, you know probably Cover 1 robber. If they both rotate the same side, probably Cover 3 sky/cloud. If they both come up, think pressure! If the SS moves up to a slot/TE and the F/S cheats to stand over him, think SS blitz. It goes on from there. This is easy enough to do in practice. Put the W/S and SS out there and tell them to line up in their base position and have the DC tell them to play their coverage with no one else on the field. You'd be amazed at what you can learn.

MOFO and MOFC can tell you a lot though. I use this as the primary post-snap read unless my QB is a superstar. I want him to recognize coverages on film and on the practice field and the blackboard, but in live situations it is merely an indicator; he still must go through his progression, it just helps him know which receiver is probably going to be open and which progression to work.

I have a really good article that Tom Coughlin did when at Boston College from awhile back. It's still the best article on coverage recognition I've seen. If someone could put it on the web for me I'll email it and you can link to it in this thread.

http://coachhuey.proboards42.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=pass&thread=1136529807&page=1#1151371958