If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times: One of the reasons Bill Belichick is so good at what he does is because he’s able to give up on a player one year early rather than one year too late.
Obviously, that doesn’t always work out the way he plans. Tom Brady, quarterback of the Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is an asterisk so big it can be seen from space. But the “one year too early” thing isn’t necessarily a staple of Belichick’s football ideology. Rather, it’s symptomatic of the Patriots coach’s general approach to team-building and game planning.
New England again looks like a legitimate Super Bowl contender. That the Patriots have found their stride as the season goes on isn’t much of a surprise in hindsight, now that we know they’re a run-heavy, big, physical team. That obviously plays well as the weather gets worse — which bodes well for the near future, too — but it also looks like an increasingly shrewd play in today’s NFL where there has been such an emphasis on speed and the passing game in recent years.
Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer had an interesting column Friday about the ever-evolving nature of the league, the “cyclical” changes that happen frequently. As the rest of the league was getting pass-happy, Belichick decided — somewhat dictated by his own faults — to zig when the rest of the league was still zagging.
The result is a heavy, tough team that becomes increasingly difficult to play over the course of a game or the season. There obviously was no better example of this than Monday night’s win in Buffalo, where the Patriots ran 49 plays — 46 of which were designed runs. That’s obviously an outlier influenced in large part by 50 mph wind gusts in Orchard Park, N.Y. However, that the Bills couldn’t do much to stop New England was telling. Buffalo isn’t necessarily dumb, but it didn’t have the sort of roster designed to stop the Patriots. When you build your roster with speed and athleticism to keep up with the Kansas City Chiefs or the Baltimore Ravens, you do leave yourself susceptible to power running attacks.
It’s probably no coincidence then that four of Buffalo’s five losses have come against hard-nosed, between-the-tackle teams: Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Indianapolis and New England.
“So many teams want to play Golden State Warriors football,” an unnamed executive told Breer. “They want to sprint up the field, take shots — hit the three, if you will. Not many teams in the league can afford to get in those types of shootouts against a Kansas City. We have to break it down, we have to play half-court basketball. We have to play possessions and keep the ball out of your hands. The best way to do that, obviously, is to run the ball and control the clock.”
That starts in the trenches, of course, where the Patriots have committed significant resources to restoring the offensive line. The Patriots have the NFL’s best offense by EPA since Trent Brown returned in Week 10.
“(A good running attack) starts with the line — in team construction, the line of scrimmage is the foundation of the house,” an AFC general manager told Breer. “If you have a (expletive) foundation, the first storm is gonna blow the house over.”
Another AFC head coach seemed to hit the nail on the head: “I think so much of the engineering of defenses is for the passing game, so some of these run performances are more reflective of that … The Patriots and Indianapolis, they’re built structurally to run the football, in terms of the lines they have.”
The other part of it, as Breer notes in his story, is a team needs a good defense, too. If the Patriots really are committed to making the run game the focal point of their offense, they can’t afford to fall behind by 10 or 14 points. That’s why, in hindsight, Monday night shouldn’t have been surprising at all with the weather completely taking away what Buffalo wanted to do offensively.
It’s also why a potential Patriots-Chiefs matchup in the playoffs would be fascinating. Looking at the rest of the AFC, Buffalo might be the only other team other than KC that has the offensive firepower to put some space between itself and the Patriots, forcing New England to put the game in the hands of rookie quarterback Mac Jones, something that hasn’t happened much if at all this season.
The cyclical nature of this entire thing means it’s likely to shift again soon. The Patriots’ success might ultimately inspire an offseason game of follow the leader, and if that ends up being the case, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Belichick once again change directions in an attempt to stay ahead of the pack.
Oh, and keep this in mind, just in case we’re still talking about the Patriots in February: New England’s running game has evolved as the season goes on. In October, it was historically bad against … the Bucs.
