- Preseason defenses are more vanilla: Cover 1 accounted for 25.6% of league-wide preseason coverages in 2025 compared to 17.6% during the regular season.
- Chicago changed its coverage tendencies the most: The Bears posted a league-high 37.3% Coverage Tendency Difference, shifting away from Cover 0 and Cover 1 toward more zone coverage once the regular season began.
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Every August, we hear that you can glean absolutely nothing from how an NFL team lines up in the preseason. We’re told to take every standout offensive performance in the preseason with a grain of salt because opposing defenses are running vanilla schemes and refusing to show their true hand before the regular season.
Likewise, when a defense gets carved up in August, many are quick to come to the defense of their coordinator, arguing that he was simply calling a basic game plan while saving his best ideas for games that actually matter.
It’s a logical opinion, but how accurate is it? Are coaches really calling preseason games in an entirely different way to what they’ll call in September? After all, the preseason provides valuable live reps for playcallers, too. They still want to build good habits, communicate calls effectively and make the right decisions in a real game environment.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the theory that some teams deliberately lean into unusual tendencies in an attempt to throw early-season opponents off the scent.
My guess is that very few NFL coaching staffs are spending hours dissecting every snap that their Week 1 opponent played in August, but they’re certainly watching the tape. Only five of the 16 Week 1 matchups this year are divisional games, meaning 22 teams are preparing for relatively unfamiliar opponents and must gather whatever information they can.
That becomes even more relevant in years like this one — when 10 teams have hired new head coaches and several more have switched playcallers on at least one side of the ball. Whatever a defense looked like the previous season can no longer be treated as gospel. Suddenly, preseason film carries a little more value.
So how much do teams actually disguise what they’re doing? For this study, we’ll focus solely on defense using PFF data from the 2025 preseason and regular season.
The most obvious place to start is coverage usage. By comparing each team’s coverage distribution between the preseason and regular season, we can measure just how much their approach changed once the games counted.
It should be acknowledged that a three-game preseason is a small sample. A handful of drives can noticeably skew the numbers. Expanding the study across multiple preseasons would increase the sample size, but it would also blur the results by mixing different coaching staffs, personnel and defensive philosophies. For that reason, we’ll stick with the 2025 season.
Coverage Tendency Difference
To make that comparison, we’ll use a metric called Coverage Tendency Difference.
At its simplest, the metric conveys how many of a team’s preseason coverage calls we would have to change to match their regular-season usage.
For example, imagine a defense played Cover 1 on 40% of its preseason snaps but only 20% during the regular season. That 20-percentage-point gap contributes to the overall difference between the two versions of the defense. We repeat that comparison across every coverage type to produce one number representing how much the team’s overall coverage tendencies changed.
A score of 0% would mean the defense used each coverage at the same rate in the preseason and regular season. A score of 20%, for example, means 20% of its coverage calls would need to be reallocated from one coverage type to another for the two sets of tendencies to match.
The lower the number, the more representative the preseason was of the team’s eventual defense. The higher the number, the more its coverage usage changed once the regular season began.
Coverage Tendency Difference — Top Five
| NFL Rank | Team | Total Variation Distance |
| 1 | Chicago Bears | 37.3% |
| 2 | Atlanta Falcons | 29.1% |
| 3 | Detroit Lions | 28.6% |
| 4 | Cincinnati Bengals | 28.0% |
| 5 | Jacksonville Jaguars | 27.6% |
These defenses gave away relatively little about how they would play once the regular season arrived. The Chicago Bears stand well clear of the field. They called Cover 0 on 14.4% of preseason snaps before reducing that figure to just 5.6% during the regular season. Their Cover 1 usage also dropped from 33.3% to 22.2%.
Those snaps were largely redistributed into zone coverages. Chicago more than doubled its Cover 3 usage while exactly tripling its Cover 2 rate. The defense looked completely different.
That is particularly notable given it was Dennis Allen’s first season running the unit. Rather than spending August repeatedly drilling his preferred coverages, Allen appeared comfortable keeping some of his tendencies under wraps.
Was this an intentional strategy? It’s impossible to be sure. If so, did it work? No, it did not. The Bears allowed 0.187 EPA per play across their opening two games, 29th in the NFL, surrendering 79 points before eventually finding their footing. However, those games came against division rivals, who were already familiar with much of Chicago’s personnel.
Jacksonville is an interesting example of a defense that entered the season as a total unknown. Anthony Campanile, entering his first season as an NFL defensive coordinator, adjusted his schemes at the fifth-highest rate of any play caller between August and the remainder of the year. In particular, Campanile barely called Cover 6 during the preseason before using it on 21.8% of regular-season snaps, the second-highest rate in football.
Jacksonville opened the year against Carolina in a cross-conference matchup. Bryce Young threw three interceptions, including one against Campanile’s Cover 6 and another against quarters presented with a Cover 6 look before the snap. While it’s impossible to say preseason tendencies directly influenced those turnovers, Jacksonville certainly looked different once the games counted.
Now let’s take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Coverage Tendency Difference — Bottom 5
| NFL Rank | Team | Total Variation Distance |
| 28 | Dallas Cowboys | 13.8% |
| 29 | Cleveland Browns | 13.6% |
| 30 | San Francisco 49ers | 12.7% |
| 31 | Los Angeles Chargers | 11.4% |
| 32 | Miami Dolphins | 6.5% |
The league average was 19.8%, so teams sitting in the low teens aren’t necessarily giving everything away. Miami, however, stands out as the outlier here.
The Dolphins’ coverage profile barely changed between preseason and the regular season. They led the NFL in Cover 2 usage at 24.3%, and the preseason pointed opponents clearly in that direction. They also played relatively little Quarters coverage throughout the year, another tendency that was already visible in August.
Defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver was dismissed along with the rest of Miami’s coaching staff from last season, and head coach Jeff Hafley now takes over defensive duties. Hafley’s Packers ranked almost exactly league average in total variation during his final season in Green Bay.
Looking at coverage usage across the league, there is clear evidence that defenses are indeed more vanilla during the preseason. The biggest indicator is Cover 1, which accounted for 25.6% of all coverages in the preseason compared to just 17.6% during the regular season. That’s a substantial increase in one of football’s most basic coverages.
No coach embodied the basic nature of the preseason more than Dan Quinn. Washington already played Cover 1 at a relatively healthy 20.5% clip during the regular season, but that figure was comedically high at 44.4% during the preseason. Whether that reflected a desire to keep things simple or to evaluate players in straightforward assignments, it was one of the clearest examples of a team stripping its defense back to the basics.
Another interesting angle is how coverages are disguised. PFF cannot identify every disguised coverage in football because the number of possible intricacies is effectively endless. However, rotating a safety immediately before or at the snap remains one of the league’s most common methods of disguising coverage.
Across the 2025 regular season and playoffs, defenses rotated a safety on 30.2% of snaps. And that figure was very slightly higher during the preseason at 32.8%.
This may seem counterintuitive, but one likely explanation is tempo. Regular-season offenses are more likely to hurry to the line, leaving defenses with less time to rotate at the snap. Preseason games generally unfold at a much slower pace, naturally affording defenses more opportunities to move safeties around before the snap.
Finally, we must take a look at blitz rates. Blitzing can be employed for any number of reasons, but on the whole, it essentially increases both the potential reward and the potential risk of any defensive call. With little on the line in August, it isn’t surprising that the league-wide blitz rate dipped slightly compared to the regular season.
The Steelers were the clearest example of a team holding back their blitz packages. They blitzed on just 19.8% of preseason snaps, ranking 28th in the league. Once the regular season began, that figure jumped to 37.1%, the third-highest blitz rate in football.
You could take this study much further by examining personnel packages, fronts, simulated pressures, situational playcalling or even individual down-and-distance tendencies. But even with relatively simple metrics, the overall picture becomes fairly clear.
NFL defenses are not treating the preseason as an elaborate deception exercise. Most teams trial plenty of their regular-season tendencies in August, and the average difference in coverage usage is smaller than most fans might expect.
That said, a handful of coordinators clearly do keep something in reserve. While others showed almost exactly who they were from the very beginning. Who will those teams be this time around? Well, we won’t know until October at the earliest.
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