by John Powers
BACKUP QUARTERBACKS
With Tom Brady starting (and almost always finishing) games since 2001, his understudies rarely get off the sideline. Before he was traded to the 49ers in 2017, Jimmy Garoppolo had appeared in only 17 games in three-plus seasons and started only two. During the past decade, the Patriots usually have kept only one reserve quarterback, but he’s aware that he could be under center at any moment. That’s how Brady got the job, when Drew Bledsoe went down with a serious chest injury.
“When you’re the backup quarterback you can go in after the first play like Matt Cassel did in 2008. You can go in on one of the last plays of the game like Tom Brady did in 2001 or somewhere in between. You never know as a backup quarterback. You have to be ready to go from the first play to the last one in all situations.”
BACKUP QUARTERBACKS’ PRACTICE ROLE
“They have a huge role in getting the defense ready to play, particularly trying to simulate not just the quarterback but the whole tempo and mannerisms of the offense. Cadence, shifting, motioning as well as the actual quarterback mannerisms and the way they read plays or execute them, trying to do it similar to the way that we are going to see it on Sunday…. That’s when a quarterback can sharpen up some of his skills as well. You are working against the first defense and hopefully [defensive schemes] that are somewhat designed to stop what they’re doing, so that the throws and the reads are tougher. Working against our defensive players doing our thing sometimes is a lot harder for a quarterback than running our offense against a defense that doesn’t quite execute the other team’s defense as well as what we’re going to see on Sunday.”
RUNNING BACKS
“The running backs have a tough job. They have to run the ball, find the holes, read the defense, and sort all that out. And in the passing game they have blitz pickup responsibilities and have to run routes against different defenses. Man, zone, when to break it, when to throttle down, when to accelerate, when to pull up, when to keep going, having to clear the line of scrimmage to get into the route and all those things. They are involved in every single play. It’s like being the middle linebacker—there’re no plays off. They have to do a good job on all those and a mistake can be costly. Missing a blitz pickup, ball handling, not running the right route, not catching the ball—any of those things can potentially be a big play. Those are critical jobs. I can’t say, ‘It’s okay if we do okay on this but we can screw that up.’ Everything’s important.”
The coach holds forth outdoors during 2017’s June minicamp. (photo by Jonathan Wiggs)
RUNNING BACKS’ VISION
“A key to it is knowing when you have time to set blocks up and use the blocking scheme ahead of you to pull defenders one way or the other and cut off them, and when you don’t and you just have to hit it and get through there because there’s just not enough time. That’s an instinctive thing that backs I’m sure learn through experience, and some have better than others.
“When you have that ability to have a little space and you have the patience to set up those blocks and force a defender to declare one way to set the block for lineman, guard, center, tackle, whoever it is—and then be able to cut off, that’s really ideal. Sometimes you just don’t have that luxury as a back. You have guys closing in on you and you just have to get through there and run with good pad level and get what you can.
“But patience is a key to that when used at the right time. We all hate to see the backs that run in there and have patience and then don’t gain any yards. You want them to get the ball into the line of scrimmage and then go. So there’s a fine line between when you have time to do that and when you don’t.”
JUDGING RUN QUALITY
“Just because it’s not a 40-yard run doesn’t mean it’s not a great run. A lot of times the first guy who gets to him is 35 yards downfield. That doesn’t make it a great run. There are a lot of five-yard runs where there’s nothing there and the back gets five yards. Some of the best runs you’ll see are five- [to] seven-yard runs. How does a guy get seven yards when you look at the play and there’s nobody blocked? You think he’s going to lose a yard or at best get back to the line of scrimmage, and he almost gets a first down…. Just because it’s not a 50-yard run doesn’t mean it’s not a good run. You see plenty of them on film—breaking tackles, making guys miss, finding yards when it doesn’t really look like there are many yards there. That’s what good backs do. It’s not just about how many yards a guy gains. You’ve got to look at the play.”
FULLBACKS
“Most of the pure fullbacks in the NFL today, they’re probably more like the quarterback in the single wing. They’re almost like guards. They don’t carry the ball very much. They catch a few patterns in the flat but they’re really more blockers. Jim Brown—I’m not saying the guy couldn’t block but the guy ran pretty well. When I first came into the league, most teams had a fullback who ran the ball and a halfback who ran the ball, the Sam Cunninghams of the world.
“Now, you very seldom see a fullback who has anywhere near the same number of carries that the running back has. What most teams have done, they’ve split those responsibilities and said, ‘Okay, who is our best running back? That’s the guy we want to have the ball. Let’s give him the ball and let’s get somebody else to block for him.’ That has gone further to say, ‘Well, we have a guy who can block for him and run the ball. We have another guy who can really block for him. Let’s put the guy who’s really a good blocker and we’ll give our runner the ball a little bit more and give the other guy who carries it, give it to him a little less, and let’s get someone in there who can really block.’ A Lorenzo Neal–LaDainian Tomlinson situation. Neal is not going to have many carries, doesn’t expect many, probably doesn’t want many. Tomlinson is going to get by far and away the majority of them.
Belichick in a lighthearted mood before the 2011 AFC Championship Game with Baltimore. (photo by Bill Greene)
“You don’t see the fullback-halfback combinations like you saw in the ’70s, and you had to defend the fullback runs because fullbacks were good runners, as were the halfbacks. That’s changed quite a bit. That’s more of the Wing-T type of offense where you have inside runners, outside runners, that type of thing…. Once you got into the I formation, then you have a runner and a blocker. From there you took the fullback out of the formation and went to a one-back set, so you have a runner with either six guys in front of him or the seventh guy being a tight end who is a move tight end, the H-back and all that. That’s been the transition.”
TIGHT ENDS
“Generally speaking, the tight end could be the hardest position to match up on for a defense because it’s hard to put a linebacker on the real good receiving tight ends like some of the guys we’ve seen—Tony Gonzalez, Jeremy Shockey, Dallas Clark. It’s hard for the linebackers to cover guys like that. And the defensive backs who have the speed to cover them, they’re outweighed by 20, 30, 40 pounds and maybe give up two, three, four inches in height and length. So that’s an issue. It’s really hard to find a guy that’s the same size as a Gonzalez or a Clark or Shockey that can cover them. You’re either finding a smaller guy that can run with them or a bigger guy that can be physical with them but probably can’t run or doesn’t have their kind of quickness.
“So it’s a tough matchup whereas the receivers and corners are much more matched physically. Every once in a while you see those big 6’4”, 225-pound receivers that are hard to match up against. But for the most part those physical matchups are more in line than with a good receiving tight end. That’s the challenge of those guys. They’re really receivers in a tight end’s body. Those are tough matchups.”
PASS PATTERNS AND COVERAGES
“An awful lot of plays have guys running deep—post patterns, flag patterns, go routes, whatever it is. You don’t throw them on every play but they’re there on every play depending on what the coverage is and what the ma
tchup is. If the quarterback sees it and the receiver runs a good route, then that’s a good option. If the coverage takes that part of it away or they roll into that, then the quarterback reads the rest of his progressions.
“Sometimes you can play the percentages and think, ‘Okay, there’s a pretty good chance that we’re going to get this pattern on this coverage.’ Or if you run that pattern on this coverage, sooner or later you’re going to get the coverage you’re looking for and you’re going to take a shot at it. But there’s also plenty of times that we go out in practice and run plays and then we get in the game and we see something and it takes us to that and maybe we’ve practiced it and maybe we haven’t. Say you run 100 plays during the week in practice—35, 35, and 30—and then you have goal-line plays and situational plays in there. And then you think of all the different coverages a defense can play on third down, on second down, on first down, in the red area.
“I understand they’re only out there 60 plays, too, but you’ve seen on film, you’ve seen them play six, seven different sub coverages, a couple different blitzes, six, seven regular coverages… four, five blitzes on that. You go into the game with whatever number plays you have—the variables are just exponential. It’s just so difficult to match up something unless you have a real strong tendency that they’re going to do this when you give them a certain look or certain situation.
“I’d say that’s maybe 10 percent of the time. It’s not a high probability. You go out there and run your plays. You can’t run them against all 10 different coverages that you could get in that situation. You run them against the ones you think are most likely or maybe what their tendency is or maybe what you think they’ll do to you. But a lot of times it doesn’t turn out that way and you have to adjust to it.”
MATCHING RECEIVERS AND CORNERBACKS
“The advantages of it are that you get the matchup you want. You want this player covering that player, you got it. The disadvantage is, where do the other 10 players go? Normally that’s not an issue because we just line up where we line up. But, ‘Okay, now you’re going to match up to so-and-so. So where do I go? All right, I take somebody else but what if he’s not in the game? What if we’re playing zone? What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this combination of guys is in the game? What if that combination of guys is in the game? Then who do we match up to? What if the guy that we’re matching up to is out of the game, then who do you match up to and who do I match up to?’ There’s a lot of moving parts there.
“It’s real easy to say we’ll just take him but it’s not that easy. I mean, if you just want to play One Coverage, but nobody does that. You’ve got zones, you’ve got mans, you’ve got combination man/zones, you’ve got blitzes, you’ve got zone-blitzes. So it’s easy to match up and it’s easy for that player. The hard part is, what does everybody else do, and we all have to wait and see where you go before we can all figure out where we go.”
DEFENSIVE SCORES
“When you get points from a defensive score, you can’t count on those points. You can’t go into a game and think, ‘All right, we’re going to get seven points on a defensive score.’ Over the course of the year, that maybe happens two or three times, whatever it is. So when you get those in a game then that’s pretty significant. The overall statistical advantage to scoring a non-offensive touchdown, that team is going to win more games.
A record five Super Bowl rings have earned Belichick the enduring faith of the Foxborough fans. (photo by Jim Davis)
“You put turnovers in there, you recover a fumble on the one-yard line—that’s not a defensive score but if that ends up being a score you have a similar result. That’s why the turnovers are so important, because they aren’t always point plays but they usually result in points, especially if you get them in good field position. Then you’re already in the scoring zone. A safety is part of that because even though it’s only two points, it is possession, so it’s a little bit of an added benefit.”
DEFENSIVE MASKING
“It’s got to be coordinated as a team. You can’t have one guy disguising on things and somebody else disguising somebody else. A good quarterback would probably be able to figure out what you’re trying to do and see that one guy is way out of position. You have to be very well coordinated on that because what they do with the cadence, they make it hard for you to do that. Sometimes they run up and snap the ball real quickly so it forces you to get lined up. Other times they go up there and they delay and check the play and get into a formation that makes you declare so they can see what you’re in and then get to the play they want to get to and go at a very slow pace. It’s hard to over-disguise because if they go quick then you could be way out of position.”
DEFENDING THE NO-HUDDLE OFFENSE
“The biggest challenge is communication. They are used to running plays quickly, getting to the line, calling them and signaling them and not coming back to the huddle. Doing it from extended formations, getting lined up and going. Defensively we’re used to doing it in an end-of-the-half type of situation, but on an every-down basis it stresses your communication and recognition a little bit. Making sure that you see the offense, see where they are located because they will move them around. They don’t just stay in the same formation all the time.
“Usually at the end of the half you see a lot more of that. You see more of the same formations because fighting time they don’t want to take time to switch people around. Recognition and communication are two of the big things. And then you can’t let the pace of the game and the communications challenges take away from actually playing, the technique, reads and doing your job. You can’t let all that other stuff distract you. You get so caught up in that and the ball’s snapped and you don’t do anything.”
A grim coach jogs off the field at halftime of the 2013 AFC title match at Denver, with his team trailing and headed for defeat. (photo by Jim Davis)
DEFENDING THE RED AREA
The red area [inside the 20-yard line, aka, the red zone] is where games primarily are won and lost. Holding an opponent to a field goal from there several times a game is a major factor in victories. The Patriots defense has improved markedly in that regard and last year ranked second in the league in points allowed per red-area trip [3.94].
“There’s nothing more important than the red area. If you don’t give up big plays they have to go through the red area to score, so if you don’t give up big plays and you can play good red-area defense then it’s hard for them to score a lot of points. Those are always two big points of emphasis every week—not to give it all up in one play and to play well in the red area and hold them to field goals…. Offensively, everybody’s closer to the line, so the safeties are linebackers. Linebackers are, in a lot of cases, borderline defensive linemen. Everything’s just compressed.
“So there are a lot of things you have to handle differently. Routes are different, coverages are different…. Generally you see more size in that area because there’s less space, so speed is less of a factor. There’s only so far you can run. Technique is important. Coordination is important. The proper spacing, the proper leverage, using the space that you have. Of course everything happens so much quicker down there because there’s less space and less time so throws and catches have to be good. A lot of tight coverage, a lot of catches away from the body into a short space. Defensively, you’re fighting for every inch, every yard. It’s critical. Two yards at midfield is one thing. Two yards on the 5-yard line is 50 percent of the length, 50 percent of the field. So it’s all heightened, it’s all more urgent.”
SECOND- AND THIRD-DOWN DEFENSE
“On first and second down the offense has a lot of options. They have one or two more downs so you can pretty much do any play you want. I don’t think there’s really anything that you can’t do on first down. If you want to take a shot and throw one down the field and you hit it, great. If you don’t, you still
have two more downs to pick it up. Until you get into four-down territory, when third down could be like second down, third down is really a possession down. Then you have to get the yardage that you need offensively, and defensively you’re trying to defend the yardage that they need to get. It’s really a one-play series, not a three-play series.”
NICKEL DEFENSE
“That’s an every-week game-plan discussion. Do you want to match? Do you want to not match? Or, what situations do you want to match in? Or, are there some three-receiver sets you want to match, others you don’t? Maybe who the tight end is, who the back is, maybe who the receivers are. Sometimes it’s not always the same three guys. Maybe a certain receiver changes how you want to match up. Maybe it’s by down-and-distance...It’s every week. It’s how and when to match up with multiple-receiver groups and multiple–tight end groups as well.”
FORCING A SECOND READ
“Anytime you can force a quarterback to make after-snap decisions and make multiple ones then you’re on the right track. I don’t understand playing defense and going back and letting the guys do what they want to do and have a field day. I don’t think that’s good defense. I can’t imagine you’d want to do that against any team—young, old, anywhere in between.”
INTERIOR LINE PLAY
“A lot of the interior game for the linemen is being able to recognize how much weight the guy has going forward, which might indicate whether he’s going to penetrate or stunt. Or being able to recognize the width of the offensive line’s splits or how far back they’re sitting, if they’re going to pull, a lot of little things like that.
“When you draw up the formation and put it on a scouting report, the formation looks the same, but the little variation of the lineman’s weight distribution, his stance, his split, his depth, whether he’s in a two-point stance or a three-point stance, sometimes how far back one of his feet is or the relationship of the guard and tackle on the side of the ball, that kind of thing. There are a lot of little things a lineman can pick up out there. They can pick it up during the game as they start to play against the player. You can’t see that kind of detail on film. You’re just too far away and the pictures are being taken from the top of the stadium and you just don’t get it like you do when you’re lined up a foot or two away from the guy.
