Preseason is in full swing and we’re getting our first glimpse into the defensive scheme of Jonathan Gannon. I’ll have more on that in the coming weeks but first, we still need to fill in the context of what his scheme is and where it went, and we’ll do that by diving into his first season in Arizona as the head coach.
No other season in Jonathan Gannon’s three-year sample in Arizona looks like 2023. As noted in the early down section, the Cardinals didn’t lean toward zone coverage in 2023 as they
did in 2024 and 2025. In fact, the Cardinals’ 2023 defense, in Arizona, built their entire early down identity around playing in a zone shell.
Early down rates: zone prioritized above everything else
In looking at 839 early down plays (1st and 2nd down) in the three-year sample, we can see that in each year the Cardinals played a lot of zone. In 2023, early down snaps in zone were 76.88% (or 648/839), in man coverage they were 13.47% (or 114/839), and other schemes such as prevent, etc. were 9.65% (or 77/839) of plays.
In sum, this is a defense that relies on the eyes of its players to complete assignments versus man coverage by cornerbacks. Thus, play calling on early downs was nearly 6-to-1 in zone versus man. This is the highest of the three years for early down plays.
Of the various Cover structures that can be used to employ a zone defense, the structure of Cover 3 is by far and away the most basic to field. Here, the three corners all play in a three-deep format. We found that over 84% of all early down plays for the Cardinals in 2023 utilized a Cover 3, or similar, structure. Early down structure for the Cardinals in 2023 essentially equated to playing in a basic three-deep zone for the vast majority of plays called.
Of course, such plays were frequently mixed in with plays that employed other Cover structures.
The one place that this defense didn’t hold back was in their use of Cover 0 on early downs. The Cardinals played Cover 0 on 5.48% of their early downs in 2023, a number that was more than double the rate of both 2024 and 2025.
Early down blitz rates were at their lowest in 2023 at 16.50%, however this was a defense that was extremely aggressive on first and second down, sending rushers in scenarios where the math favored such a move. This was in stark contrast to third down where the defense displayed a coverage discipline that was not on display during the rest of the season on early downs.
Every Scheme, Side by Side: 2023 vs. 2024 vs. 2025
This graph shows the early down coverage in the three seasons, with all the schemes side by side. The big gap in coverage is not limited to a few schemes, but rather spans almost the entire call sheet. The four schemes that are ran at a higher rate in 2023 than in the two following seasons are Cover 3, Cover 4, Cover 2 and Cover 6.
The one scheme that did not change as much is Cover 1, which was treated as a change-up package in 2023, and as a result, it was not changed as much as the other schemes in the following two seasons.
This rarely saw the light of day, it was used primarily as a change-up package, and so this showed up very rarely throughout the sample of plays. For instance, early down, there were zero plays in 2023 for this coverage. This was used just once in 2024 for an early down play, and once in 2025 for a late down play. In sum, the use of this coverage was not typical of Gannon’s defense.
Other schemes, aside from those previously discussed, made up the remaining 7.99% of the plays from 2023, while 2024 and 2025 saw use of these other schemes for late down plays in just 0.69% and 0.93% of all late down snaps, respectively.
First Half to Second Half: A Real In-Season Adjustment
For early downs in 2023, Gannon saw a defensive scheme morph over the course of the season in ways that he did not see in 2024 or 2025. Here, we see through the morphing of the defensive scheme in 2023 to find a clear pivot by the Cardinals away from three-deep zones and toward two-high safety structures.
However, as the season went on the defense morphed into a totally different entity, morphing from 3 deep zones to two high safeties. Looking at the Cover 3 number for example, early in the season the Cards played a high number of Cover 3 plays at 36.58%, but as the season went on the number of Cover 3 plays decreased 16.6% to 30.50% as the team relied on other Cover types.
While Cover 3 decreased drastically, the team’s use of Cover 4 and Cover 2 increased dramatically with the number of Cover 4 plays increasing 46.8% to 25.73% and the number of Cover 2 plays increasing 37.8% to 14.32%. Although the team’s use of zone increased throughout the season the defense changed to a two high safety look with two high safeties rather than three deep zones, or at least that is how it appeared.
Third Down: zone-heavy but not too aggressive
We look at third down in the same light as the rest of the early down plays. Here, too, the defense was an early down defense – heavily in zone. In 206 third down plays, they were in zone 68.93% of the time, the highest of the three years for early down plays, or roughly 80% higher than 2024 and 2025 for third down plays.
Man coverage was used 21.84% of the time, or roughly the same amount as in 2024. This creates a very high zone-to-man ratio of 3.2-to-1, the highest in the sample for third down plays.
However, as previously established, early down blitzed more frequently than third down. This year was no exception, and on third down found itself to be the least aggressive of the three years at 16.50%. That early down covered aggressively on first and second down, only to pull back into more standard coverage on third, resulted in third down proving to be the most ‘coverage disciplined’ of the down.
Notice how the third down numbers for zone and man coverage create the most lopsided numbers in the entire chart for the 3.2 to 1 zone to man coverage ratio. Again these numbers are higher than the two subsequent years of 2024 and 2025 for both the 2.5 to 1 and 2.9 to 1 numbers respectively.
Third down numbers for the season did change as the year progressed but in the opposite direction of early down numbers. Man coverage was used on 20.35% of third downs in the first nine weeks of the season and on 23.66% in the last nine weeks of the season.
The number of blitzes increased to 17.20% from 15.93% in the first nine weeks of the season. Zone coverage was used on 68.14% of third downs in the first nine weeks and on 69.89% in the rest of the season, a rise of only 2.6%.
The Bigger Picture: 2023 Was an Outlier, Not a Baseline
Looking at all three years, it is clear that 2023 was an outlier year. Not only was the early down zone rate much higher than in 2024 and 2025 (77-88% higher), but the nature of the defense in terms of scheme and personnel usage was also different from the two subsequent years.
What could account for this big of a change? In all likelihood, there are a few factors at play here, and none of them are necessarily mutually exclusive. For one, there was a significant amount of turnover in the secondary between 2023 and 2024, and it’s possible that the subsequent years featured a coaching staff that was employing more of a disguise-based, man-coverage-heavy approach to defending.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the 2023 defense was simply a group of players that were fit to a particular scheme (in this case, a zone-heavy, early down identity), and that in subsequent years, that particular roster would evolve, and the subsequent years’ scheme would follow suit. Either way, though, what’s most impressive here is that the 2023 defense showed a real capacity for in-season adjustment.
Key Takeaways
An early down identity of zone defenses. The early down defense in 2023 was the most zone-committed of the three years in the sample at 76.88% (early down zone% = (Cover 3% + Cover 4% + Cover 2% + Cover 6% + Other Schemes%) / Early Down Man% * 100).
This was 80% higher than 2024 (48.45%) and 2025 (42.32%). The defense primarily used a Cover 3 (33.8385), and used a Cover 4 (21.22%) and a Cover 2 (12.16%) as its primary secondary looks. The early down defense also used a Cover 6 on occasion (3.54%). All of these coverages were used at a higher rate than in 2024 and 2025. Only the Cover 1 was used at a rate similar to the other years.
A real in-season pivot point. A point in time where the staff fundamentally shifted from a three deep, single high zone defense, to a two high safety structure. A drastic shift in their early down defensive strategy. Cover 3 usage declined by 16.6% in the latter half of the season, while Cover 4 usage skyrocketed by 46.8%.
As it turns out, the defense in 2023 was the most aggressive early down defense in the sample, pressing early and often in man coverage. Not only did Cover 0 reach a season high of 5.48%, but man coverage reached 13.47% of total defensive plays, the highest of any season in the sample.
Blitzing on third down was selective, not aggressive. The 16.50% third down blitz rate for 2023 was the lowest in the sample. Thus, the early down, high zone based 2023 defense, was selective in its use of aggression on third down. Here, the 68.93% third down zone rate for 2023, was the highest of the three years and again confirmed that a zone first defense was used on literally every down for 2023.
But in a dramatic way that actually contrasted with the early down trends above, third down saw Man and Blitz rates trend up in a big way over the course of the season as a whole. To be more specific, third down saw Man coverage usage rise by 16.3% and Blitz rates rise by 8.0% from the first half of the season to the second half. (Early down zone rates kept rising in a big way over the same time frame of course.)
So if you add it all up, third down saw the biggest rise in Man and Blitz rates of the 3 year sample (greater than even 2025 for example) as the zone-first defense actually unleashed the greatest amount of heat of all on third down in the greatest number of scenarios.
