Greg Cosell spoke on Doug Farrar’s Week 12 preview podcast Friday morning. Here’s what Cosell said the Saints will try to do against Colin Kaepernick.
FARRAR: If you were the Saints, how would game plan for Kaepernick?
COSELL: The Saints defense has played better the last couple of weeks. Clearly they are understanding Steve Spagnuolo’s pressure concepts a little bit more. We’re seeing a lot more of the zone blitz schemes that he’s done very well over his career.
The one thing they have to be careful about with Kaeperick – because you didn’t see much of this at all last week against the Bears – you didn’t such much read-option and you didn’t see much designed movement, which I was surprised by. Maybe they never got to that because the other stuff was working so well.
My guess is the Saints know that, and they’ll spend a lot of time in New Orleans working on read-option and working on boot action.
What the Saints want to do with Kaepernick is what you want to do with any young quarterback. Does he have the movement element? Yes, but you still want to make sure that his pre-snap reads are muddied, you want to disguise, you want to move people around, you want to show him something before the snap that he’s not going to see after the snap.
On the other side of the ball, you’re the Niners and you want to do what they did against the Bears. You want to try to create personnel packages, formations, shifts, motions where the Saints can’t do all that stuff, can’t disguise because they have to mark off on certain players.
If all of a sudden Vernon Davis shifts outside the numbers, somebody’s got to go with him. You can’t say, “Forget about him, we’re going to do our blitz.” That’s the chess match in football. The Saints are going to try to disguise, and the 49ers are going to try to prevent the disguises from being effective.
