Enhanced Cover 3 Zone Defense

Yesterday we showed you a simple way of getting pressure on opposing quarterbacks.  Today’s free madden-school.com tip goes over how to enhance your zone defenses.  There is so much talk about how effective light blue flat zones are that people forget about the effectiveness of the purple buzz zones.  We are going to demonstrate how the purple buzz zone defends against everything the light blue flat zone does and much more.

Formation: Dollar 3-2-6

Play: Cover 3

Setup:

1. Hot route both cornerbacks in the light blue flat zones to purple buzz zones

Lets go over this coverage defense in a little more depth…

The first play we demonstrate our modified cover 3 against has flat routes on both sides of the field.

You can see in the pre-play screenshot that it appears that the flat routes should be open for about a 5 yard gain.  (In past versions of madden this would be true)

However, you can see that our defender in the purple buzz zone still jumps that route and can swat it down or get an interception.

Now we are going to run the exact same defense just this time against extended out routes which would crush the light blue flat zones. 

 You can see that everything is set up the exact same way except this time the offense has changed it’s play to try to beat our cover 3 defense.

 You can see that our defender in the purple buzz zone drops all the way back to the 20 yard line and gets an easy interception.

This whole week we will continue to provide more defensive tips for madden 12, but if you want to instantly get better on defense, make sure to check out the madden-school.com defensive lockdown ebook.