The 2026 preseason has concluded, but the Green Bay Packers’ three games gave us a glimpse into the mind of Jonathan Gannon as the new defensive coordinator gears up for his first season calling the defense. While Gannon called a mostly vanilla preseason, he did throw a couple of interesting blitz calls out in the first week of the preseason, giving a glimpse into concepts that we’re likely to see a bit more in regular season games.
A coordinator like Gannon has a deep tool belt for generating pressure on opposing quarterbacks, and one of the more unusual concepts he can call is often referred to as “hot quarters coverage.”
It’s a rare call, one we’ve seen a few times the last couple of seasons under Jeff Hafley. In the preseason, I charted it only twice but it’s a fascinating way to manufacture pressure precisely because of how much extra communication it forces an offense to handle before the snap.
The core idea is simple in concept but hard to defend: get the offensive line to slide its protection away from where the real pressure is actually coming from, freeing up a rusher the offense never accounts for.
This particular pressure concept was popularized by Brian Flores, defensive mind who built his reputation on manufactured pressure and disguised fronts, and it’s since spread around the league as coordinators borrow pieces of it to create the same problems for opposing quarterbacks and offensive lines.
The front is built to bait the protection into sliding fully to one side, with the hope that a rusher comes free away from the overloaded side. Typically, two defenders will “pop out” late from the box into underneath zone coverage, locating and matching the second and third receivers in the pattern from the inside out — that’s the “hot” element the concept is named for.
Because so many defenders are stacked on the line pre-snap, the offense is often forced into a full-slide protection scheme to account for numbers, which all but guarantees that one edge defender comes free with no one assigned to him. Any breakdown in protection communication — particularly a missed check on a mugged linebacker showing blitz — puts the quarterback in immediate danger.
The stress this concept places on offensive communication comes from the crowded, chaotic pre-snap picture it creates. All that traffic near the line of scrimmage makes it difficult for the offensive line to identify who’s actually rushing and who’s dropping, and that hesitation or miscommunication is exactly what the defense is hunting for.
On the back end, the coverage borrows from split-safety, split-field principles. Rather than a traditional two-deep, four-under shell, the coverage defenders play match-quarters technique, matching receivers based on route distribution — corners carrying the first receiver out and vertical, safeties matching the first inside and vertical release. The two pop-out defenders are reading and matching the number two and number three receivers underneath, splitting responsibility between them.
In one example of the concept in action, the offensive line slid its protection toward the pop-out defenders, whose late movement pulled the offensive linemen’s eyes and technique with them.
That slide left the middle of the protection compromised, and a blitzing linebacker came through almost untouched to pressure the quarterback. The quarterback got rid of the ball in time with a check down to the flat to avoid the sack, but the disguised pressure and coverage combined to hold the play to a modest gain.
What makes the concept so effective in short bursts is that it attacks protection rules rather than raw talent — even a well-coached offensive line can get exploited if the pre-snap picture is disguised well enough that their eyes and slide go the wrong direction.
Because it’s used so sparingly, it also retains an element of surprise: offenses that haven’t specifically prepared for it in that week’s game plan are far more likely to misidentify it, which may be exactly why coordinators tend to save it for moments when a free rusher would do the most damage.
Punch is a five-man rush, three-deep/three-under fire zone pressure that sends the nickel back off the edge while simultaneously rushing the backside end.
The coverage is a true five-man pressure built around safety rotation into the nickel spot, tagged with a “Ringo/Lucky” call — the signal that tells the front which side the zone pressure is arriving from so the line and second-level rushers can sync their rush lanes and stunts.
Because it commits five to the rush, Punch leaves only six defenders in coverage, which is what separates it from the more common “simulated” pressure teams will disguise as fire zones.
Where sim pressures often bluff five rushers and drop back into a four-man rush at the snap, Punch actually sends the extra man — making it a genuine, “true” fire zone rather than a pre-snap disguise.
What separates the best fire-zone pressures — and what makes the quarters zone pressure and “Punch” effective — comes down to three things: they manipulate protection rules (forcing the offensive line into bad slide or gap-exchange decisions before the snap), they attack the running back in pass protection specifically (since backs are the weak link in most protection schemes against an extra rusher), and they’re timed to exploit the offense’s protection call rather than just adding numbers.
A well-disguised, well-timed fire zone doesn’t just outnumber the protection — it wins the answer key before the snap.