NFL Zone Coverage

Beating Zone Coverage: NFL Coverage Efficiency Analysis

By Adam Koplik and Ajay Patel

Overview

This was one of my first deep dives into football analytics — a research project focused on identifying which passing concepts work best against different zone coverages in the NFL. The goal was to analyze trends in offensive success rates against Cover-2, Cover-3, and Cover-4 defenses, and to recommend strategic adjustments for teams facing those schemes.

Data Sources

  • NFL tracking data
  • Play-by-play data with coverage tags
  • Publicly available player route and result data

Approach

  • Collected play-by-play data and filtered for passing plays against Cover-2, Cover-3, and Cover-4 defenses.
  • Calculated success rates and EPA (expected points added) for different passing concepts like verticals, flood, slant/flat, and mesh.
  • Compared average EPA per concept against league averages by coverage type.
  • Visualized which concepts consistently outperformed expectations against specific coverages.

Key Findings

  • Flood and mesh concepts were especially effective against Cover-3 defenses.
  • Verticals struggled against Cover-4 but performed well against Cover-2.
  • Teams were often over-relying on certain concepts in unfavorable matchups, missing opportunities to exploit defensive tendencies.

Tools Used

  • R, RStudio
  • ggplot2 for data visualization
  • Excel for data prep and manual coverage tagging

Takeaways

This was my introduction to working with football data and play-by-play analysis, and it gave me an early sense of how much nuance there is in matchup-based play calling. It also laid the foundation for later, more advanced NFL data projects I’ve worked on — including the NFL Big Data Bowl.

Visualizations

Top 10s