Originally posted by BoDiddley
Xars made a post about beating zone D.....and then had more than a few troubles with said zone D.
Yes and no.
I didn't detail everything that went on with my team and game planning. Up until the first BSB game I was in the running for top of the Ladder. I went a little counter to my Zone attack plan against BSB and lost 21-24. I had a few losess, but all were less than one score. So I felt good about the team overall in terms of the testing platform I built. After that I became much more experimental in trying things for the future rather than S54.
I beat the The Seven - they seem to win the first League game we play as they are home and I win the second at home when it's colder - and then faced Dream Team. Just before the Dream game, I changed up my D a lot to try something new. I ran multiple scrims the day before and was pretty confident I'd lose, but I wanted to see how it performed in a real game. So instead of going Pass coverage heavy like I did with Gliwice, I went a new route.
Then I played Himalays and didn't scout them because I was busy with other projects so I didn't even realize they played Zone. Never setup anything to properly attack them. We got run out of the building so then I became even more experimental, not less. The second BSB game came up and, again, I was busy with other projects. I had tweaked my playbook for the prior game as a retrospective but not with the intention of running it again. I used those settings, scored zero and lost 12-0. My defense played really well but not my Offense.
For the third BSB game, I just used my normal anti-zone strategy and won a close game, coming back in the 4th Q and winning in OT. The final game against Lexington I didn't put any specific planning into. Myrik has probably thought I was using that game as part of my anti-Zone comments but it really wasn't. I didn't even watch the game. My focus had been on the previous scrims I was playing, with regards to my defense, and then the wind effect (30 mph) on my noodle arm QB, which were all the scrims I ran on the next day. I was adjusting a bunch of settings around all of that and preoccupied intellectually.
My playoff game against Airborne featured 24mph winds. So you build a low Pass Power QB to loft over Zone and then the wind kills you in SHIP games and end of season Ladder? Which means you need a high Pass Power QB, but then you get picked off all the time by Zone LBs. That's a big advantage to Zone in SHIP / late Ladder games actually - if you get high winds for those games. That's not a guarantee by any means, but it was something I was pondering. It's also contra to actual football where strong arm QBs are a virtual necessity. The wind effect, combined with what Zone was doing, was putting QBs in a box. The wrong box. The solution was to improve Pass Power. Something that should have been improved ages ago. As I've said, Belgarath, my first S* QB, had 69 Pass Power. I've never built a QB since that was even close to that.
People completely misconstrue my Zone is Dead comments all the time. My specific comment is that current Zone is a bad matchup against the overloaded formations. It's not that you can't win at all with it, it's that you won't win the majority of games against top teams. Top teams will, eventually, exclusively use overloaded Offensive formations and win 55-70%+ of the games against the other top teams. What have I been saying for years to GE? TRIPS. Not that Zone is bad against every formation (it's not), but it's not setup to deal with TRIPS. At least with matching up against Big I, you can use 4-4 Big (virtually no one does). But against TRIPS, no one has ever asked for a different formation setup and I find that perplexing when it's so obvious that's how you build the Zone. Instead, there's this belief that a single CB can cover 3 WRs.
From a game balance perspective, Zone needs to be viable -
which is precisely why it needs an appropriate formation switch to handle TRIPS - and not some stupid gimmick, like jumping LB INTs and CBs who can cover 3 WRs.
Anyway, I'm open to listening to deep Zone problems. But can we at least see the problem first, before going completely nuts? And is it really a Zone D problem if you're running bullshit plays that don't match formation and personnel but then expecting Zone to excel?
Let's be smart about what should be happening.
