Dumb Football Question About Defense

[Todd4State]

I saw an interview with a coach who was talking about how his defensive philosophy was to blitz a third of the time, play zone a third of the time, and then play base defense a third of the time.

What was he referring to when he was talking about playing "base" defense because I always thought that "base" referred to more of the defensive alignment like a base 4-3 or a base 3-4? Is he basically just saying that they are going to play basic man coverage and play their traditional gap assignments and just read and react the play a third of the time?

[Spiderman]

I saw an interview with a coach who was talking about how his defensive philosophy was to blitz a third of the time, play zone a third of the time, and then play base defense a third of the time.

What was he referring to when he was talking about playing "base" defense because I always thought that "base" referred to more of the defensive alignment like a base 4-3 or a base 3-4? Is he basically just saying that they are going to play basic man coverage and play their traditional gap assignments and just read and react the play a third of the time?

Most coaches have a "base" that the whole defense is built upon. A defensive call that the rest of the defense evolves from.

For example, the last team I coached on had what we called a 31 Cover 3 as the base. 31 told the DL how to align relative to formation. Cover 3 told the secondary the deep zone responsibilities. The LB's and SS knew their zone assignments after that call.

Just a 4 man rush, with gap assignments.

99% of the time we opened in our base just to make sure we got our feet under us . After a bit you start calling to the offensive tendencies. Usually when in doubt, we always went back to base.