SAN FRANCISCO — Sometimes somebody smart writes something that makes you take note, and that happened on Tuesday of Super Bowl week.
Cover 6 is also referred to as quarter-quarter-half coverage. It’s a combination coverage. Cover 4, or quarters (deep defenders divide the field by 25%) is played to the field (wide side) or the strength of the offense (tight end side, or where more weapons are lined up). Cover 2 is played to the boundary (short side) or the weak side. The coverage often looks like something else before the snap, and that causes confusion for most quarterbacks, especially young ones (Matthew Stafford did mostly well against it in the NFC Championship, but of course he saw them three times).
Among the big takeaways from Sharp:
• The Bills played Cover 6 11.8% against the Patriots in New England’s Week 5 victory. In the Bills’ Week 15 victory, they played it 50%. “Maye averaged -0.34 EPA/attempt, had a 23% success rate, threw for 4.3 Y/A, and had a 64% completion rate. The Bills also were in Cover 6 when Maye threw an interception.”
• The Ravens, Chargers, Texans and Broncos all jacked up their Cover 6 rates against the Patriots, most doubled them.
• Maye has been one of the worst QBs in the league this season against Cover 6: #31 in EPA, #33 in success rate, and #32 in Y/A.
• The Seahawks played Cover 6 at the third-highest rate in the league.
All very interesting, for sure. But it leads to obvious questions, like, how real is this, will it be a factor, and how to the Patriots counter it?
To start, this appears to be real. I don’t doubt Sharp’s numbers, and you can definitely see an uptick in the numbers, even from the service I use, toward the end of the season. These are all the Cover 6 numbers for Maye:
Some of you may be saying, “The Bills game? The Patriots scored 31 points!” Yes, but if you remember, the Patriots scored just 7 points in the second half as the Bills came back to win, scored four rushing TDs (two big ones by TreVeyon Henderson, two by Maye), Maye’s rating was 62.8 (lowest of the regular season by far). Also, I’ll add that was my second-lowest graded game of the season, and the heavy Cover 6 games, minus the Ravens, were four of my eight lowest-graded Maye games.
And the Seahawks do play it more than most, with varying degrees of success.
I also checked out some of the plays tagged as Cover 6 for the Seahawks against the Rams, and it checks out. But I will add that the Seahawks have their own flavor, where the lone cornerback actually plays
