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Pav,

I will preface this by saying that there are 13 other coaches out there that have unsuccessfully tried to answer those very questions, so who am I to assume to believe that I have the "answer". What I think that I can tell you is that when you have a QB like Fracassa, who combines a good and accurate arm with the unique ability to know exactly where ALL of his recievers are even in a 5 wide set, you can only hope to contain him and minimize the damage - damage that WILL come to some extent.

My thoughts are...

As you will have to give him some different looks, I think you start as a base, cover 2. SHS likes to flood zones and I think that it is more sound to have a CB that is already squating in the flat, rather than a SS or WILL backer who has to break to and push the flat. In addition, I think if you charted the passes of any HS QB (maybe even some college), you will see a very low % of passes that thrown to the intermediate to deep middle. It just does not fit the "eye" of many OC's and really does not fit the eye of almost all HS QB's. Aside from a TE dump or delay, how many crossing routes or square in routes do you see attempted. It is not very many and I think JF is no exception here. Now, he has shown that he can throw accross the coverage as he checks down his recievers while on the run and his recievers are good at breaking off their routes and coming back to find open spots when he is on the run, but again, I have not seen alot of designed routes for the middle of the field and a big part of that is that SHS like to short roll and sprint out Fracassa to give him much better line of sight which again, is more condusive to out routes, comeback routes and post corner and double move routes.

Again, I think as a base you run cover 2 and roll you backers with his roll. I do think that you have to apply some degree of pressure beyond your front four and if your LB's can roll their coverage effectively, you have the option to send the "roll side" backer (almost exclusively) on a pass read blitz. It think that it is a tough call to send more than one backer because even though JF is only a fair runner, a spread out field that results form a 4 or 5 wide set creates enough lanes that even an avg runner can exploit.

Well, that's my 2 cents for whatever it's worth.