Here at your Flag Football Source we get to watch more flag football than the normal human being. It allows us to keep up with the styles of play and also some of the techniques we see being used. That is what we want to touch on today. We have the feeling that a lot of defensive back coaches do not understand how to teach their defensive backs the shuffle technique. We see young defensive backs at the NFL Flag level and others in high school and college allowing their defensive backs to consistently back peddle to cover receivers in man and zone coverage.
Flag football offers coaches fewer numbers to play with, or deal with, depending how you look at it. When you are coaching defense, the good news is that you have fewer receivers to cover and a smaller field to manage. The bad news is that it is harder to disguise what you are doing. At the end of the day, you are going to rush one, maybe two and the rest are going to play man coverage or some sort of 2, 3 or 4 deep zone.
Flag football zone defense is different than 11 man tackle football too. When you line up with eleven defenders, there are underneath zone defenders and there are deep zone defenders. In flag football, once again because of the numbers, zone defense normally means a defender plays a short zone to deep zone depending on the route of the receiver. This makes flag football zone defense inherently harder to play.
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This is why here at your Flag Football Source we teach our defensive backs or corners to shuffle first when playing zone coverage. When the football is snapped, the corner should flip their hips with their butt pointing to the sideline. As they do this they are going to shuffle off of the line of scrimmage and read the route of the receiver and the quarterback. The shuffle technique allows them to see everything on the field, including the quarterback.
If the receiver runs a quick slant or a hitch, then the flag football corner can plant the back foot after one shuffle and break up for the flag pull. If the receiver pushes up the field to break the defensive back's cushion, then the corner will shuffle maybe one more time before they come out of the shuffle and run with the defender. This allows your corner to stay wide as the widest and deep as the deepest.
Don't get us wrong. The flag football shuffle technique needs to be taught and drilled just like any other technique. Our friends over at USA Football do a good job explaining a more complex version of it in this video. Give it a watch and use this proven technique to help your young flag football defensive backs not get beat over the top in your next flag football tournament or game!