Patriots Charting Interesting Metric In Jerod Mayo’s First Season

The NFL has a lot of interesting metrics that get charted.

DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) is a metric that aims to identify how much better or worse a team performs relative to the league average. You’ve almost surely heard of it, as well as things like pass-rush win rate, run-block win rate and other things of the like.

The Patriots pay attention to those, but they’ve also started doing something rather unique.

Patriots offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt revealed on Thursday that the club charts instances of players picking each other up, per Andrew Callahan of the Boston Herald.

Why? It’s a culture metric.

“There’s nothing that frustrates me more than watching guys not pick each other up off the ground,” Van Pelt said, per Mark Daniels of MassLive. “We ask these guys to be great teammates — run to the football. When you run to the football, good things happen and while you’re there, let’s get our guys off the ground. We ask the ball carries, if you’re on the ground, stay down, somebody’s coming to get you. That’s the mentality that we have. We play for each other. We call it, ‘For our brothers,’ in the room.”

New England charted 58 instances of that unique metric during its win against the Chicago Bears, with offensive tackle Demontrey Jacobs winning the team’s “pickup award” with 11, according to Van Pelt.

Is it silly? Yes, it is, but it’s also the type of thing that can galvanize a unit without making such a big deal out of it through ra-ra speeches from the coaching staff. The Patriots are trained to do little things like picking each other up off the turf, which could help consistency with the more pressing stuff.

Dumb? Maybe. Interesting? Certainly.