by John Powers
Belichick salutes the fans after the home playoff victory over Baltimore during the 2014 season. (photo by Matthew Lee)
“As a coach and player you’ve got to focus on a few key things and make sure you get those done. Every defense can’t stop every play that they’ve shown. Every play can’t block every defense that they’ve shown. It’s impossible. But you have to put your chips on some number and go with that and then be ready to adjust during the game when you see things declare.
“Or maybe they’ve got three or four different ways to play a certain look. How have they chosen to play it this week? We’ve seen these two or three things but it looks like it’s going to be more like this particular version and we have to adjust to that. It’s a different dynamic than playing a team that you’re trying to get familiar with, [a team] you don’t know everything about…. Rarely do we come out of games saying, ‘We’ve never seen them do that before.’ That’s usually not what we’re saying.”
FACING A DIVISIONAL RIVAL THE SECOND TIME
Though the Patriots have owned a lopsided advantage over AFC East opponents under Belichick, their record in the second meeting of the season is exceptional—a combined 41–15, including 11–3 following a loss in the first meeting.
“There’s some recall. I think you still need to go through the process because each team is different. There are situational plays and their down-and-distance tendencies and formations and, of course, they keep doing things to disguise it and change it up as we do, as every team does. But I think the big thing is you know the personnel. You know the players. You’ve played against them, you’ve matched up against them and you know what their strengths and weaknesses are, or you know how you match up against those individual players. I would say there are not a lot of players playing in this game that didn’t play in the last one a month ago. The Xs and Os, the schemes, the formations—those matchups always change a little bit. But I think it does help you to know the players and how they use them and what their roles have been through the course of the year. Whether they used them that way in the last couple of weeks or so, you still know that’s basically the guy’s role on the team and you can prepare for it.”
OPENING-GAME UNPREDICTABILITY
The Patriots are 13–5 in opening games in the Belichick era. After dropping three of their first four, they won the next 10 in a row.
“Each team has held things back in preseason, whether that’s by design or whether it is just by the sheer number of plays that your top players have played together. So even if you play a quarter in the first game, a half in the second game, three quarters in the third game, and a quarter in the fourth game, you still won’t even have two full games. So how many plays can you run? How many things can you show, even if you’re not really trying to hide a lot? Everybody will keep a few things back. You keep things back, they keep things back, and then you go out there in the opener and you have a multiple of things that we haven’t practiced against or that they haven’t practiced against. So how will it all match up? At the second week, you at least get a look at the first week where nobody’s holding back anything. There’s less out there.
The coach during one of his less voluble moments with the media before the Super Bowl duel with the Seahawks. (photo by John Tlumacki)
“There’s always something new in every game, but the more that gets out there the easier it is to prepare for it. I’m not saying the easier it is to defend, but the easier it is to prepare for because at least you’ve seen it. But I think the multiples are what really get you. At Kansas City [under Andy Reid], you don’t really know what personnel group they’re going to be in. You don’t know what formation they’re going to be in. The plays that they’ve run basically will be the plays that they’ll run, but we don’t know how they’ll build them or how they’ll create them. I’m sure they’ll have some new plays. That’s hard to get ready for from their standpoint. I’m sure they’ll look at us and say, ‘Well, we’ve got 19 games last year, and some games we’re in this, some games we’re in that, and some games we’re in something else.’
“So they’re trying to get ready for a pretty broad base, kind of like what we are on offense. We watched all of Kansas City’s games from last year. Some games they’re doing more of this, some games they’re doing more of something else, so what are you going to get? Do you spread yourselves thin and work on a little bit of everything? Or do you put more eggs in one basket and say, ‘Well, we really think they’re going to do this,’ and concentrate on one particular area here? Then you better hope you’re right. That’s opening day and it’s a lot harder to figure that out than it is after two or three regular season games that you’ve watched from experience.”
PREPARING FOR NEW WRINKLES
“It’s hard to have like 10 new runs every week. Usually what you have is maybe one new run, but sometimes the runs that you have that are your core plays, you try to disguise and run differently. Either different personnel, maybe a different formation, maybe change the look a little bit so that the defense doesn’t see the play until right when or after the ball is snapped, as opposed to being able to look at it for five or six seconds and say, ‘Okay, here comes the lead or here comes the power or here comes the counter,’ or whatever.
“What we need to do defensively is understand the basic concept of the play, knowing that they can get to it in a lot of different ways. They can build it formationally, they can build it from different personnel groups, but in the end here are the basic blocking schemes, this is what we have to defeat. Can we guess which way they’re going to run it? Probably not. But their basic core plays from different looks, can we recognize those after the snap? Hopefully, yes, that’s the idea.
“When you go back to Washington’s offense—Joe Gibbs was there when I was at the Giants—they really had only three plays, but the plays were the plays. But it’s unbelievable the amount of success they had running the inside zone, running the outside zone, and running the counter OT. And all three plays kind of looked the same. They could pretty much do all of them out of the same or very similar looks. They complemented them well. Those were the ones you had to stop. There might be one or two other things sprinkled in, but that had to be 90 percent of it. They won a lot of games doing that.”
FAMILIAR COORDINATOR, NEW TEAM
“Any time a coordinator changes, you go back to your notes for that coordinator, with the team he was at and what he did there. That travels with the guy. Sometimes that stays the same. Sometimes it gets modified a little bit. Sometimes it changes. Depending on who the head coach is, you just have to look at it. Sometimes it matches up pretty cleanly. Sometimes part of it matches up, like maybe it’s the third-down package but their base defense is different or vice versa. You see certain elements of it. Maybe the pressures are the same but the zone coverages are a little bit different or whatever it happens to be.
“The same thing in the kicking game, offense, defense. I think you definitely want to track those guys. That’s part of what you do in the off-season. You look at your opponents on the schedule. You look at coordinators who have changed or maybe a particular person that’s been added to the staff. Maybe it’s not even a coordinator but a new offensive line coach… that guy might have his protection system or he might have his running game, certain schemes, or that type of thing. You see that scheme element has been added and then as you go through the year and you look at it you say, ‘Okay, how much of an influence is this? Yeah, we know they have that, but they’re not using it a lot. It looks like this guy is running his protections and maybe the coordinator is running his pass patterns, or whatever it is.’”
Coach and quarterback observe the defense at work during the 2015 home triumph over the Jets. (photo by Jim Davis)
WHODUNIT
“A lot of times you don’t know exactly who’s doing what, but you just see what the team does and that’s what you prepare for. So whe
ther it’s a quarterback, an offensive coordinator, a head coach, the offensive line coach in the running game or the same people on the defense and special teams—coordinator, head coach, specialists, signal caller, key guys. However it all comes out, the bottom line for you is that’s how it comes out. So the inner workings of who actually does what, whose call it is and so forth, doesn’t matter as much to us as what the final result is of what we have to defend or what we have to deal with. What we try to identify is how they play certain situations, what their strategy is or what they’re going to present to us that we have to deal with. However that comes out, whoever called it or set it up and strategized it, that means a lot less to us than what they actually do.”
PREPARING FOR SPECIFIC PLAYERS
“We prepare for all guys on the active roster. We just don’t prepare for one guy. It wouldn’t make any difference…. It’s like that at every position. We know who the players are, we know who the backups are based on what we know, what we’ve seen, what we anticipate to happen. Who would be the next perimeter corner? Who would be the next inside corner? Who would be the next safety? Who would be the next dime guy? Maybe they wouldn’t use dime, maybe they’d use nickel. Who would be the next nickel guy?
“Whatever it is, we have to be ready for that. It’s one play away from happening. We always prepare for all the players who are on the active roster. Then we come to the game and before the game we cross off the seven guys who are inactive. So, okay, this week they only have two tight ends active or they only have five linebackers. Or, here are the guys who are inactive, whether they’re injured or whether they’re inactive for other reasons, whatever it happens to be…. Maybe that gives us an indication, a little bit more information of maybe what type of game it might be. If a team has extra DBs active for our game and maybe less defensive linemen, maybe that’s an indication that it’s going to be more of a nickel game.
“Or, vice versa, a team keeps extra tight ends and running backs and fewer receivers, maybe it’s an indication that they’re going to try to play bigger, that type of thing. But until that point, we work with everybody. I know a lot of people who live and die on the injury report but I don’t really care what’s on the injury report. Look, I don’t know how these guys are going to be, either. We can put down whatever we want. But they’re humans—some get better, some stay the same, some don’t get better. There is no way to know for sure and there are a lot of times it comes down to game-time decisions. I’m saying that about our team and I’m with them and I’m talking to our doctors and trainers every day.
“But other teams, they’re going through the same thing, too. Just because a guy is on the injury report and whatever he’s listed as, that doesn’t really mean anything. Guys that aren’t well can make quick recoveries. Guys that are well can not turn the corner. So we’re ready for those guys, too. Honestly, I don’t even care what’s on the injury report. I really don’t even look at it. Unless a guy is definitely out, then okay. If he’s not, then to me we’ve got to be ready for him.”
TRACKING SPECIAL TEAMERS
“We try to know where every player is going to be on special teams. We go through every player on the kickoff team, what their strengths and weaknesses are, where they line up, if they move around, if they are usually in the same spot, who the safeties are, who the contain guys are, who the first guy down is, which guys play behind. Somebody is the first guy down. Somebody plays behind them. Some guys go to the ball. Some guys are more lane players. Absolutely, we go through that every week, every game, and we do the same thing on the punting game, punt returns, and kickoff. We have an individual scouting report on each player that plays on every one of those teams: what their tendencies are, what their strengths are, what we think their weaknesses are, and how to play them.”
CHANGING GAME PLANS
“I think you can change certain elements from week to week, but it’s hard to change everything every week. Some teams, if they are going to change certain things then other things stay the same. Like maybe their two-minute offense, their goal-line offense, their red-area offense, or their third-down offense. Then they change something else, like their first-down offense, or they change their third-down offense but they keep their running game the same, or they change their running game but they basically keep their red-area the same.
“It’s hard to change your entire offense every week, but I think if you play a 3-4 team then these are the runs we’re going to run against a 3-4 team. If you play a 4-3 over-and-under team, well, here are the runs we’re going to run against a 4-3 over-and-under. They might be completely different. You see teams do that, but if they do that then they probably don’t change everything else. You see some teams pretty much run the same runs every week but depending on what coverages you play.
“If you’re a zone team then they have this set of patterns. If you are a man team then they have this set of patterns. If you are a pressure team then they have another set. If you’re a quarters team then they have another set. Now if you mix it up then they mix it up. It’s like they have a little block on their game plan. If you’re playing Cover 2, we run this. If you’re in Cover 3, we run that. If you blitz, we run this. Other teams do it by protection. It’s hard to give a specific answer to that. I think what you have to do each week is figure out what their formula is, what they’re going to change and what they’re not. What their philosophy is in certain situations, on certain plays, or certain groupings. Sometimes it revolves around them and sometimes it revolves around the defense.”
CHANGING GAME PLAN AFTER INACTIVES LISTED
“I guess it would depend on what’s on that list, but I’d say probably not too much. Look, you know a lot more after two series into the game than you will after looking at that inactive list. Obviously if there was a player that was a critical player for you in your game plan that wasn’t going to play then maybe that would alter something a little bit. You’re going to double a receiver and the receiver is inactive for the game then, ‘Okay, we’re not going to double him.’ That knocks that call out. Do you replace that with a different call or do you go to the next guy? Or do you just say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to double anybody. Here’s what we’re going to do.’?
“But I’d say those situations are not that frequent. If you had that situation going into the game like, okay, this guy has a bad hamstring, not sure whether he’d be ready to go or not, then we’re going to sit there and say, ‘All right, if the guy plays, then here’s what we’re going to do. If he doesn’t play or maybe he doesn’t play all the time because we know he’s dealing with something, maybe he’s in on some plays and out on some plays, then we wouldn’t game plan him when he’s not on the field.
“There really aren’t too many of those situations where, out of the blue, somebody that you think is going to play [who’s] a very significant part of the game plan totally catches you by surprise. But if that were to happen—say a guy got suspended or he had a family member die or came down with some bug or something the day before the game—it’s no different than if he got hurt on the second play of the game. You make that added adjustment.”
RIVALS’ OPENING SERIES
“Some teams have a game plan, whether it be on offense or defense, and they start out playing that game plan…. Halftime adjustments, I mean, that’s ridiculous. Why wait ’til halftime? There it is. The first series of plays you can see what they’re going to do, so you better start dealing with it. There are other teams that maybe anticipate that you’re going to play a certain way and they script the plays, and a lot of times the scripts are to break their tendencies like, ‘Okay, we’ve done this so we’re going to start the game and show this, but do that. We want to get the ball to this guy because we want to try to get him going, so we’re going to put this play in.’
Belichick barks instructions during 2017’s victory at New Orleans. (photo by Jim Davis)
“So maybe thos
e first few plays are just how they want to start the game. Maybe that’s not really the game plan at all. Maybe that’s just they want to break their tendencies. They want to show you something. They want to throw a deep pass to back the corner off so they can throw in front of him. They want to throw a quick pass to get the corner up so they can throw behind. So sometimes those plays are significant in terms of, ‘Okay, here’s the way it looks like they’re going to play us.’
“Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes a team will come out and play zone coverages the first few plays to see what kind of formations you’re using, see how you’re trying to attack them offensively, and then once the game gets going, then, ‘Okay, here they are, let’s go after them,’ that type of thing. It doesn’t always declare that way. A lot of times those first few plays are just a little bit of mirage. You’ve got to be careful about [thinking], ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ when really that’s not the case at all. That’s just the way they want to start the game. That’s not really the way they want to play the game. I don’t think there is any set book on that.”
TRAVEL PLANS
While the Patriots know years in advance that they’ll be boarding planes for New York (actually, New Jersey), Buffalo, and Miami every season, their non-divisional road schedule varies each year. Last season (2017) they played in New Orleans, Tampa Bay, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Mexico City (against the Raiders). This year (2018) they’ll travel to Jacksonville, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit.