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© June, 2006
Stubborn Goal-Line Defense Keeps The End-Zone Door Slammed Shut

by Hank Schrader
Former Defensive Coordinator, Bellevue High School, Bellevue, Wash.

ALMOST EVERY COACH says that goal-line defense is the most important zone on the field and that your team needs to play great goal-line defense — but very little is written about this important area or covered during coaching clinics.

Why is this? Is it because many coaches do not have a goal-line defense that works effectively most of the time?  Way too often in my coaching career, when my defense has had its back against the wall, my teams have failed to make a good goal-line stand. I tried an 8-3 scheme, and my original version of a 6-5 scheme, but neither of these schemes produced great results.

During the off season between 2000 and 2001, while I was the defensive coordinator at Bellevue high school, I began to study and play with goal-line defensive ideas. I came across an article written by Dale Sprague, of Western Maryland College, and I knew I had found a possible answer to my problem.
I took Sprague’s base scheme and came up with several new ideas and tried them at our football camp. To my great surprise, our great wing-T running attack from Bellevue — one that averaged well over 400 yards a game — could not effectively block this newly devised defensive scheme when we ran it in practice. The other great fact was that the defensive players couldn’t wait to play it!

Principles of the Goal-Line New Scheme
The goal-line defense detailed in this article is based on three essential principles. 

1.  The are two nose guards in the A-gaps and each NG must attack his assigned gap.

2.  The defensive ends line up in D-gaps outside the last man on the line of scrimmage and blitz the backfield without losing outside contain. 

In this position, they are unblocked by any ...The full article can only be seen by subscribers.
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