[Pitt Gorilla]

Originally Posted by Megatron96

Yeah, according to those posters in that thread, Frazier does not play man much at all. Spags was kind of coaxed into playing a lot of press man because of the plain fact that he had a handful of young/inexperienced DBs, and what they did best by a wide margin was play man. At the beginning of the year, our young secondary was getting torched whenever they played zone, so it made a lot of sense to gameplan a lot of man coverage.

But one of the many things really like about Spags is that he didn't simply throw up his hands and give up on playing zone, just because the early results showed that the secondary was really porous when playing zone. He kept coaching up his unit, kept calling zones, and gave his guys tons of opportunities to fail/succeed and learn from their mistakes over the course of the season.

And now they're able to play zone coverages much better than before, which opened up the playbook for Spags, allowed him call a much more unpredictable game and kept QBs/OCs from getting too comfortable.

And now this is a secondary whose weaknesses have shrunk considerably and are now a strength of the defense and definitely not a weakness.

And all of that started with Spags believing in and coaching up his players regardless of how they struggled initially, even when a lot of the sports reporting media and fanbase didn't.

Honestly, it's probably why his defenses continue to improve during the season every year. He's always playing the long game to get the most out of the talent he has in any given year.