Read Part One here

Beyond the basics of the scheme, there were some fun things the Husky 4-4 brought out that caught plenty of attention. I’m going to talk about two in particular that became Hokie staples. Remember, Phil Elmassian was a defensive backs coach when he took a liking to the scheme, and Frank Beamer is on record saying he liked how the scheme handled receivers. At the same time, the Husky 4-4 was a beast versus the run. One way the defense achieved this was by pairing an “inverted” Cover-2 alignment with “robber” coverage.

The traditional Cover-2 defense has two safeties playing deep half zones and the corners and linebackers in underneath zones. The invert flips the script: the corners play deep, while the rest of the secondary plays shallow. In the Husky 4-4, the rover and whip end up playing the short zones along with the mike and backer.

There’s beautiful logic here. In the secondary, the best pass defenders are generally cornerbacks and the best run stoppers are generally safeties. Given this, why not put the corners in the deep zones chasing people around, and the safeties close to the line of scrimmage? There was a bonus to doing this with the Husky 4-4. In the traditional Cover-2, the corners had limited involvement in the run game because they were on the edges of the field. In the 4-4, though, the linebackers started off in the box, and the free safety wasn’t too far behind them standing still and watching the play develop. That created almost a nine-man front for stopping the run.

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