Blitzing

The Art of Pressure

Blitzing

I have a problem.

I don’t know when to blitz.

You can see it in the first two 1980 Cleveland Browns games. We blitzed a grand total of 3 men in both games combined.

It’s not that I don’t understand the mechanics. I think my problem is that I’m too conservative, too worried about the computer throwing the ball over my head and finding the hole our linebackers left behind.

Blitz Research

There is a way to scout out these possibilites beforehand, of course. We just need to follow up the good old Play Analysis tool.

We’ll pick on the 1972 Miami Dolphins this time around. Let’s see what happens to their defensive abilities when we start blitzing. We’ll put them up against the pass-heavy New York Jets.

Now, Namath and the 1972 Jets didn’t exactly have the greatest passing attack of all time. Here’s how they look against the basic 3-4 Dolphin defense:

The picture is even more grim if Miami is looking for the pass:

Watch carefully, though, and see what happens when we blitz somebody. Here we are blitzing Swift from the outside:

My read on this is that the pressure coming on the quarterback makes longer passes less effective. However, moving those chess pieces in the box forward opens up the shorter passing game.

It’s a similar story when it comes to blitzing safeties. Here’s what the possibilities look like if we blitz Anderson:

And here’s what happens when we blitz both safeties:

Perhaps now you can see the reason for my hesitation! Bringing one guy does work, but if you bring too many you’re liable to be schooled in the end.

Blitzing Against the Run

One interesting thing I’ve learned from all of this fiddling around is that blitzing can be a pretty effective tactic against the run, depending on who you blitz.

Here’s what the Jets look like running against that basic 3-4 defense:

Now, if we decide to blitz the outside linebackers, this is what happens:

Those probabilities do go down, but not by a whole ton.

However, if we go wild and blitz both safeties, now look at what happens:

The chance of a gain is still there, but it is considerably less than it was before.

Automatic Blitzing

As you saw on Sunday, I’ve started to go over to the world of having the game automatically choose blitzers for me.

I consider this to be the equivalent of telling the players to make a blitz decision on their own rather than waiting for a signal. That works better in my head than simply leaving the decision over to the defensive coordinator.

This is easy to set up. When you are on defense, you’ll see the “auto blitz” box under the Blitzers screen:

This does not mean that you’ll blitz on every down. Rather, you’ll blitz when it is appropriate.

It also doesn’t mean that the computer will always “guess” right, by the way. You’ll see mistakes from time to time. However, this is a relatively safe way to play around with blitzing without setting yourself up for criticism after a major mistake.