Football Nickel Defense (2024)

FAQs

What is a nickel defense in football? ›

In American football, a nickel defense (also known as a 4–2–5 or 3–3–5) is any defensive alignment that uses five defensive backs, of whom the fifth is known as a nickelback. The original and most common form of the nickel defense features four down linemen and two linebackers.

Every team obviously uses different terminology for their substitution groupings, but for our class nickel will mean five defensive backs in the game, dime will mean six DBs and quarter will mean seven. The majority of college teams use a standard defense that employs four defensive backs on the field.

In American football, the dime defense is a defensive alignment that uses six defensive backs. It is usually employed in obvious passing situations.

A base defense consists of two cornerbacks and two safeties, making the nickelback the fifth defensive back on the field, thus tying the name of the position to the name of the North American 5-cent piece.

The 3–3–5 defense can also be referred to as the 3–3 stack or the spread defense. It is one form of the nickel defense, a generic term for a formation with five defensive backs. Veteran college football defensive coordinator Joe Lee Dunn is widely credited with being the main innovator of the 3–3–5 scheme.

The 2-4-5 is ultimately a defense of specialization as the main pass-rushers are going to be the two stand-up edge rushers. The defense deploys them on the edge because that's the easiest way to utilize a pure pass-rusher and they aren't asked to do a great deal other than control the edge and provide pressure.

Penny refers to the 5-1 personnel package on the field. In the Fangio system, Sam is the strong side or passing strength EDGE, and the Will is the weak side EDGE.

"Nickel", "Dime", "Quarter", and "Dollar". The unit increases in relation to how many defensive backs are on the field. Nickel means five defensive backs (usually three CB's and two safeties, but can be reversed). Dime is six DB's, Quarter is seven, and Dollar is eight.

The nickel, dime, and quarter defenses in football are packages that defenses run. These packages are about how many defensive backs are on the field. The nickel package in football means five defensive backs on the field, dime packages have six defensive backs, and the quarter packages have seven defensive backs.

In American football, a 4–3 defense is a defensive alignment consisting of four down linemen and three linebackers. It is called a "base defense" because it is the default defensive alignment used on "base downs" (1st and 2nd downs).

What is the Tampa 2 defense? ›

The Tampa 2 is typically employed out of a 4–3 defensive alignment, which consists of four linemen, three linebackers, two cornerbacks, and two safeties. The defense is similar to a Cover 2 defense, except the middle linebacker drops into a deep middle coverage for a Cover 3 when he reads a pass play.

As seen in the figure below, the ratio of nickel to base has increased from close to even to now greater than 2.5x, with teams in nickel more than 65% of all defensive snaps through Week 3.

A nickel is worth 5 cents, and a dime is worth 10 cents. So, one dime is worth the same as two nickels. Accordingly, we can say that the value of a nickel is half the value of a dime.

In a base 3-4 defense, the defense will have 3 defensive linemen, 4 linebackers (2 inside linebackers, 2 outside linebackers/EDGE), 2 cornerbacks and 2 safeties. In Nickel, they'll take one of the interior defensive linemen out and replace him with a cornerback, leaving two interior defensive linemen.