Zone blitz

A zone blitz sends extra pass rushers at the quarterback while dropping a player who'd normally be rushing, often a defensive lineman, back into zone coverage instead, disguising exactly who's coming and who isn't. Dick LeBeau popularized the scheme with the Cincinnati Bengals and later the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1990s, and it spread across the league specifically because it solves the classic weakness of a normal blitz: sending extra rushers usually means leaving coverage thin, but a zone blitz keeps zone coverage intact by disguising which five or six defenders are actually coming. The confusion is the entire point. A quarterback has to identify the rush and the coverage in under two seconds, and a well-disguised zone blitz is built to make both reads wrong at once. Full breakdown at Bleacher Report.