Teams used to run a “base” defense — usually either 3-4 or 4-3 — and in obvious passing situations, an offense would deploy three receivers. Defenses would respond by using their sub package — usually nickel with five defensive backs. The trends have flipped now, though, and sub has become base and a “regular” alignment with just four defensive backs is dying.
“I think that’s part of building your team is trying to anticipate where your team is going and to a certain extent where, especially defensively because you have to react to what they put on the field,” Belichick said Wednesday. “Defensively, you have to be able to defend those things. How do you construct the defense so you can handle the different challenges that you have? I think if you look at the numbers statistically, the amount of five defensive backs that are on the field, you’ll see numbers shift dramatically but particularly this year. You can see a trend, but there’s a spike.
“There’s only a very few number of teams, maybe four or five, that were under 50-percent nickel. So, when you talk about what defensive system do you run — virtually every team in the league, the defense they play the most is nickel. Five defensive backs, whatever version it is. There are five DBs, put it that way. Whatever the rest of it is, you can look at that separately. That’s certainly not the way it was 10 years ago. I’d say we were in the 30s, 30 percent, high-30s. Now that number is doubled. We’re almost, I think we’re in the 70 — where’s our stat guy (ESPN Boston’s Mike Reiss)? But you know, I think we’re in the 75 percent range of nickel defense this year. Now you know, we’ve been ahead some, but we’ve also played a lot of multiple receiver teams.”
