How Losing Devin McCourty Actually Could Help Patriots

FOXBORO, Mass. — The Patriots lost their longtime defensive leader when Devin McCourty announced his retirement this offseason. Replacing him won’t be easy and likely will require contributions from multiple different defenders.

But could McCourty’s departure actually help New England’s well-stocked defense this season? That’s the argument veteran safety Jabrill Peppers made Tuesday.

McCourty, of course, is one of the greatest defensive players of the Bill Belichick era. The Patriots don’t have anyone on their roster who can replicate everything he provided from a performance, communication, leadership and durability standpoint.

What they do have, though, is a squadron of defensive backs who can play multiple positions. Removing McCourty, who primarily played as a free safety, will allow the Patriots to plug in another one of those hyper-versatile DBs.

“Now, you don’t know where anybody’s going to be.”

Patriots safety Jabrill Peppers

Peppers is one such player. So are safeties Kyle Dugger, Adrian Phillips, Jalen Mills and hybrid rookie Marte Mapu, who’s played both linebacker and safety this spring and earned praise from several veteran defenders.

Cornerbacks Jonathan Jones, Myles Bryant and Marcus Jones also have experience at safety. Joshuah Bledsoe has seen reps at deep safety and in the slot. Even first-round rookie corner Christian Gonzalez has shown some positional versatility during his first Patriots practices.

With so many do-it-all defenders, Peppers said, good luck deciphering who’s playing where on any given play.

“We lost great leadership and communication in Devin, but it’s on all of us to pick it up. He led by example. He still comes around. We still bounce things off of him. … (But) you kind of knew where Devin was going to be most of the time,” Peppers explained after Tuesday’s minicamp session. “Yeah, he inserted, he rotated down, but for the most part, you knew 80-90% of the time he was going to be in the post. Now, you don’t know where anybody’s going to be.

“One play, it could be Dugg, could be me, could be AP, Mills. Marte could drop back there from the linebacker position. It’s a lot of different things that we can do, a lot of different tools the coaches got to play with.”

That unpredictability has been apparent in spring practice. The Patriots have rotated out a slew of different defensive back combinations, mixing and matching to find the most advantageous combinations. Newcomers Mapu and Gonzalez have impressed so far, though it’s important to note that these spring practices are non-padded and feature no live contact.

Peppers said players’ roles should be “more defined” once training camp begins in late July, but he believes the multipositional ability of this group will be an asset this season.

“I think that’s just a credit to everyone’s versatility,” Peppers said. “(The safeties have) all played in the deep part of the field. We can cover man-to-man, whether it’s a tight end, running backs or if we’ve got to replace one of the corners. And we’re real comfortable in the box. … Then you add in a guy like Marte who, you don’t know if he’s at ‘backer or safety now.

“If we’re talking pre-snap, it might look one way to the offense. We run the same play, but we just flip two guys and now it looks like a completely different defense. So we just keep spinning the dial. We’ve got a lot of continuity going on. We only lost one player — a great player — but we all know each other pretty well. So we just try to build off that and take the next steps.”

Pro Bowl edge rusher Matthew Judon had a word for New England’s most versatile defenders: “Unicorns.”

“We have unicorns, for real,” Judon said. “We’ve got a guy like Dugger who can play on the line of scrimmage, at linebacker depth, he can play at corner, but he’s a safety. And we’ve drafted players that can play from nose to middle linebacker. Then we’ve got big, rangy corners (like Gonzalez), to the corners like Marcus Jones where he played three, four different positions on each different unit — offense, defense and special teams. …

“You’ve got to get those players on the field, right? And our coaches do a great job of finding any way to get those players in different packages on the field and put them in situations where they can compete and they can win, and that’s what they’re doing. It’s not unusual for that to happen, but it’s unusual for us to have these type of players like that.”

The Patriots ranked third in Football Outsiders’ defensive DVOA last season, and McCourty was their lone offseason departure on that side of the ball. Peppers, for one, is “really excited” about New England’s defensive potential in 2023.

“Nothing that we did last year matters, but we know the type of defense that we can be if we execute,” he said. “We know where we fell short last year, the mistakes that we made that might have cost us. But we’re all a year older. A lot of guys got good playing-time experiences, and we’re just trying to build on that.”