Zone Blocking

Yesterday during Scout Offense, one of our linemen asked

"What do I do? Do I block anyone?"

I replied, "You have a simple Zone block."

"What's a Zone block?" And with that this new blog post was born.

As someone who has played and coached organized football for nearly 15 years now, it's easy for me to forget how early you are in developing your football knowledge base. After running Double Wing and it's basic variations, I wouldn't expect you to know much about Zone blocking schemes but today we'll focus on the Zone; what it is, how it's executed,why teams use this scheme and how the Zone relates to what we do.

What is Zone Blocking

Zone blocking in principle is blocking an area or gap. This leads to two scenarios.

1. The lineman is covered. In this situation he takes the man over him/ in his gap
2. The lineman is uncovered. In this situation he "combo blocks" with the covered lineman next to him as he rises to block the 2nd level (most likely to take an LB

So this means lineman running a zone will often not be blocking a "zone" at all. When covered, Zone blocking really becomes man blocking. In a situation where we'd see no LBs we'd have no Zone blocks as all of our OL now have become covered.

Here is a great video of the Zone Block done well

How to Execute Zone Blocking

Zone blocking begins with a step play side. There are two types of steps:

1. A drop step- a 3" step that opens the hips and creates a solid angle of departure when the OL is covered. This is also the step that is used during inside Zone.
2. A bucket step- a 6" open step that creates a wider angle of departure to help combo and rise to LB. This is also the step used to attack on outside Zone.

The key to your zone block is getting that 3" to 6" step of depth to create a better "angle of departure"

Once you step your blocking fundamentals remain the same

• head/chest up
• bent knees
• hips loaded
• weight on insteps of the feet
• powerful arm drive with movement from shoulders
• duck walk with short choppy steps (cut the grass)
• get proper hand placement (thumbs up and grab chest plate)
• roll hips through on contact
• finish with an Eff you block (shove off at end)

Often the Zone scheme utilizes the double team (or combo as we call it). This can happen several ways have we have and will see. Below is a diagram showing how the G and T would handle the double team in a basic zone run.

Why Teams Use the Zone

Zone blocking was essentially developed as a system to handle the increase in athletic defensive lineman. Teams were finding that straight man to man schemes were being rendered ineffective especially since the success of the team was entirely dependent on the ability of the personnel. As you can guess, this doesn't offer a coach a lot of job security as his success depends on the talent of each incoming class. Coaches were looking for a blocking scheme that allowed the line to have success as a unit.

The Zone blocking system led to success in large part to the scheme, not the quality of players. This allowed teams to thrive without having the 6'5 320lb Tackle who could play Power Forward. Weaker NFL teams and D.1 teams were finding they could find success with smaller, more athletic and intelligent lineman. As more and more teams have employed the Zone scheme its no surprise that lineman lead the league in average Wonderlic scores (25 for T and 24 for C)

For a point of reference take a look at the 1998 Denver Broncos Statistics and Lineman vs. the league average when the zone scheme wasn't fully adopted yet. The '98 Broncos were a product of Zone blocking guru Alex Gibbs.

Broncos: 525 car. 2468 yds. 4.7 yds/car. 26 TDs

Rest of League Average: 420 car. 1665 yds. 4.0 yds./car. 11.4 TDs

Broncos Starting Lineman

*= Made Pro Bowl in 1998

LT Tony E. Jones* 6-5 290, Undrafted, 13 yrs. in the NFL, 1 Pro Bowl

LG Mark Schlereth* 6-3 282, 10th Rd Pick, 12 yrs. in the NFL, 2 Pro bowls

C Tom Nalen* 6-3 286, 7th Rd Pick, 14 yrs. in the NFL, 5 Pro Bowls (all with Broncos during Zone scheme)

RG Dan Neil 6-2 285, 3rd Rd Pick, 8 yrs. in the NFL, 0 Pro Bowls

RT Harry Swayne 6-5 290, 7th Rd Pick, 15 yrs. in the NFL, 0 Pro Bowls

The average lineman now is roughly 310 lbs according to an ESPN report

What does this mean?

Teams throughout the professional, collegiate and high school levels are finding success with the Zone scheme due to it's adaptability to any defensive front and due to its lack of a dependence on blue-chip offensive lineman. it's no secret the Broncos churned out 1,000 yd rushers with undrafted and late round picks at the OL and RB spots.

The Broncos are not an isolated case. Teams throughout have found sustained success using the Zone and it is being used in an even greater variety of ways as coaches have used zone concepts in the Spread and Air Raid style offenses that are becoming more prevalent. This has given way to Zone Option or Zone Read plays like the ones we see from Milwaukee Lutheran. Coaches are finding more and more innovative ways to use the Zone scheme or merge it with some Power and Counter concepts. (UW-Whitewater does a great job with this)

How the Zone Relates to Us

As I mentioned before, the Zone scheme uses similar principles to what we do. You rarely hear me say, "You have this man!" during practice, rather I'll say you have the first 2nd level player. This is a zone concept or idea. You are not blocking men, you are blocking areas. This gives the OL better leverage like in our Combo blocks and it also gives the RBs more freedom to read and cut.

Watch our Varsity for a great example of this. Often we hit big runs when our front side combos wash out scraping LBs and our backside OL reach to 2nd level zones. A good back, in this case Logan, find sees the OL wall the hard LBs out and makes an early cutback (in the 3rd or 4th run of the video I believe). So even though our scheme isn't Zone by design, it shares many Zone principles, withe Combo block being the one that translate the most.

Hopefully this post gives you a basic taste of the Zone and can help you, especially during Scout when we show other teams schemes. If you have more questions or would like me to go into greater detail let me know.