The Changing Face of Defense in the NFL: Linebacker

This mini-series of articles is intended to show what those changes look like on the defensive side of the NFL and ask how your leagues and strategy can change to take account and advantage of them.

You can find the first article in the series here.

To be clear this article is only referring to orthodox, off-ball linebackers. 3-4 outside LBs are extremely poorly served by lumping them in with other players who perform very different roles on the field - even if there are a handful of players who do both jobs.

Overall linebacker usage

Most football fans simply think of defenses as a 3-4 or a 4-3 defense. But in fact, the usage of two packages has been falling rapidly for the last ten years at least.

The first chart here shows the number of snaps those two basic packages have been deployed over the past decade.