Originally Posted by jays52

No, I think that the run was there, and was the way to move the ball against what was shown. However, when I was watching that the thing that kept popping into my mind was what BB said to his defense with the Giants when they faced the k-gun. "You gotta believe me, if they run for 100 yards we win this game.", to me that seemed the design of the Jets. Win the individual matchups on the LOS by stunting, slanting, and looping with 3 and 4 men. Combine this with winning the outside and messing up the conjunction routes to the inside with that interior flood. It was classic Belichick. If you do that, you force them to play honest and eat clock. Of course, if those first two possessions were converted like they should have been none of this would have been possible. They baited the run, refused to respect the hashes, and forced a slow pace designed to cause erratic rhythm that played directly into the hands of the score. If the Patriots had been able to open up the areas outside the hashes, they could have ended this. The ultimate counter would have been to convert the initial two, but without doing that, they needed to utilize that exceptional depth to get aggressive against the isolated peripheral defenders.