5-2 Cover 2 Youth Football Defense

There is normally no real reason to ever play two deep safeties in youth football. Especially if you are really talking about our definition of “youth football”. Youth football is defined by FirstDown PlayBook as players 12 years old and younger.

In our opinion, unless the quarterback can expose your secondary, at least one safety should be down defending the run. That is if you even play with two safeties. We have a strong opinion that 95 percent of youth football quarterbacks cannot take a game over with their arm.

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FirstDown PlayBook did a little digging over the past six or seven years, asking as many youth football coaches as we could, if their league mandated that they play two deep safeties on defense. We thought it could be a new trend in youth football that was being implemented for safety reasons.

Requiring two safeties did not make a lot of sense to us. Most of the rules being introduced these days have the players lining up closer to one another, not further away. The more digging we have done, the more we realized that there are not very many youth football leagues doing this at all, and that’s a good thing.

Before You Install a Youth Football Cover 2 Defense, Look At The Quarterback

Remember this. The quarterback will almost always be the best athlete on the field. When the ball is snapped, if you are defending the field instead of the ball, that is a big mistake. This brings us to our point today though. What if you run up against a young 12 year old quarterback who can actually throw the ball like a 15 year old?

There are a lot of different ways to play two high safeties. The FirstDown PlayBook youth football version of cover 2 is a hybrid cover 2 man look. This way you are getting man coverage on the wideouts. You are also getting five defenders committed to stopping the run. The bonus comes with your two safeties. They are playing ten yards off the ball and keying the quarterback.

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These two safeties will key the quarterback on or off the ball. If the quarterback drops back to pass then they are extra over the top to break on the pass. If the quarterback pulls the ball down to run or hands the ball off, then they will rally to the ball. This essentially gives you seven defenders to the run game. If you want to drop a safety down and play the run pre-snap, this look makes it easy to do that too.