The Pats Have a Coaching Problem

Bedard was on D&C today, and he was talking about the coverage calls putting DBs (specifically Arrington on the first Smith TD) in a no-win situation. He said in the modern NFL it is folly to ask a CB to play "5-yard man". It's not 1985.

Froob said:

Give Seattle's secondary coach a blank check.

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Make him the defensive coordinator. Lateral moves for coaches are tough to pull off but give him a promotion and he'd probably jump.

bunuel said:

Make him the defensive coordinator. Lateral moves for coaches are tough to pull off but give him a promotion and he'd probably jump.

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This person who we want to hire, do we know his name? Yes, Seattle's secondary is excellent, but it's also extremely talented. Brandon Browner also has committed the second most penalties of any DB the last two years; so it isn't like they are extraordinarily disciplined. Browner was out of control in that Green Bay game and his cheap shot on Jennings was completely unacceptable.

Matt Patricia is a good defensive coordinator. Kris Richard, Seattle defensive backs coach, has worked in the NFL for 3 years and been a defensive backs coach for less than two. The Seahawks also have Pete Carroll, who traditionally has fielded solid secondaries both in the NFL and college (he makes it a priority). Do we know that Gus Bradley, the defensive coordinator, is not every bit as responsible for the play of the secondary? Or what about defensive passing game coordinator Rocky Seto, who has a higher title than Richard and may be just as responsible?

It makes very little sense to promote replacing a good defensive coordinator with a guy we know nothing about just because we all watched his extremely talented group play a good game. I'll advocate keeping the rocket scientist who managed to take a pretty rag tag group of guys and have them playing well enough to win a Super Bowl 9 months ago.

The Brandon Five said:

Bedard was on D&C today, and he was talking about the coverage calls putting DBs (specifically Arrington on the first Smith TD) in a no-win situation. He said in the modern NFL it is folly to ask a CB to play "5-yard man". It's not 1985.

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I've seen several Bedard tweets based on film review of Baltimore game. Pretty much absolving McCourty and spreading blame amongst his secondary mates, teamates and scheme failure.

This has been the scheme for a long time now. Corners bear the brunt of the blame when they are just doing what they are coached to do. And position coaches here are only coaching what BB's scheme directs them to focus on. Believe me, McCourty wouldn't be a captain here if Belichick felt he was worthless or not performing as coached. EHIII used to defend himself against media attacks by saying ask the coaches. Asante was a ballhawk with cement hands for his first couple of seasons. Then he was worth a bag of balls in 2005 (whole secondary if not defense was a disaster under Mangenius minus Rodney's brain) and midway through 2006 until he started catching everything in his area code 9 months after Eric took over in the swamp. Of course, thereafter the chip on his shoulder fused with his ego and he became both unaffordable and uncoachable as well as unreliable. Although Atlanta has probably snagged him at the right time and price.

I think the scheme here wears down all but the mentally toughest youngsters and savvy, instinctive vets. And Seattle's secondary owes a little something to it's front 7's performance Monday night. I think from a drafting perspective Bill hasn't wanted to land another Ty Law because then you end up in that Darelle Revis conundrum where you have to overpay to retain him even early on and after you do you risk what happened to the Jets this week sinking your season. Although we've done a little bit of that with the TE's ourselves on the other side of the ball recently.

bunuel said:

Make him the defensive coordinator. Lateral moves for coaches are tough to pull off but give him a promotion and he'd probably jump.

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All moves are lateral in the NFL except for HC offers. A coordinator is still considered a position coach for contractual purposes. Reqiure permission to approach in season and even out of season if still under contract. Not that he'd help because he would have to run Bill's scheme and not his or Pete's and with existing personnel and not Seattle's...:bricks:

Any competent NFL QB can pick you apart if he has the time to do it. So sure, you would want your D-line to apply more pressure than we got to Flacco on Sunday night. However, it hardly matters when trying to rate the play of the secondary.

In a perfect world you would pressure a QB like Flacco in the process of not allowing the offense to just take big chunks out of you, forcing them to work down the field. The dif between the upper tier QB's of the league and the Flaccos is that the upper tier guys will take their teams all the way to the promised land in 12 plays as well as 2. The Flaccos of the NFL more often than not will make a totally boneheaded throw during the 8-10-12 play drive and you have got to take that thing away when it is just hanging there to be had.

Honest to God it really does matter to me that we did not get that much pressure to Flacco in the Sunday game. It will matter in some other games we play this year but it did not matter in that game. Why? Because Flacco made a bucket of mistakes in that game all on his own as he has since the start of his career. I don't see a dimes worth of difference in Joe Flacco from where he has been to now. He had a bit more success Sunday because we did not pressure him. However he has always made boneheaded plays all by himself and I suspect at this point he always will. We just did not do enough with them because our secondary left those plays out there on the field not made.

Ya' wanna' worry about something with this defense.....from Sunday's game, it did not pressure the QB, it did not make plays in the secondary that where there to be made and it did not stop the run against a team that depends on the run. Not many bright spots anywhere on the field. But I am really worried about the play of that secondary assuming that the best players we have were on the field Sunday night.

This is a hard point to argue. We draft guys who have shown an ability to play CB in college, they look pretty impressive in their rookie year, show vastly diminished production in their 2nd year and are out the door in their 3rd or 4th years. I don't believe it's a lack of talent; we have had just too many players who were very capable out of school or even playing for other teams fail and a lot of it seems to be poor coordination between the safeties and the corners, playing too soft at the line of scrimmage and poor tackling after the catch. These shortcomings go back to scheme and preparation.
There are 2 things this team should never do...they should never draft cornerbacks and they should never draft receivers, we lack the ability to develop them into NFL level players.

But much of this takes me back to a question I asked earlier...do we bring DB's here via draft or other means because we think they will learn and develop inside of BB's defensive schemes or are we bringing talented athletes here cause they hardly ever seem like both.

Does Arrington look like, play like a talented athlete? He is a really tough kid and he does not back down from anything. But I have never thought of him as a terrific athlete for a DB. McC.....more athletic than Arrington but still not what I would call a stud in that regard. The first mistake he made on the easy dropped Int was that he jumped into the ball when he should not have had to do so. Looked like he just could not turn on his feet sharply enough and ended up making it a much tougher catch....not just happenstance that the ball seemed to bang off his hands on that play. In part that is a lack of ball skills but if you look, he just could not get himself angled back to the ball on his feet.

As for Arrington on that ridiculous lame duck Flacco threw up.....I should not have to say anything about that play as to athleticism. Another embarrassing film day moment the following week for sure.

Horace's Ivories said:

looks like bad drafting rather than bad coaching

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I tend to think along these lines than the bad coaching argument. Butler, Wheatley, Merriweather, Wilhite, and Gay have not gone on and become better players after leaving.

I think the specific problem might be how our scouting department is identifying DBs that will fit into our system.

New England does NOT have a coaching problem. It has an execution problem.

Coaches don't take the field. Players do.

Gwedd said:

New England does NOT have a coaching problem. It has an execution problem.

Coaches don't take the field. Players do.

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Well, what does that even mean. Obviously coaching matters--Belichick matters. Look at the Saints. Look at the Pats' offensive line over the years.

The talent vs. coaching question can be a tough one to unravel, though. On balance I look at the coaching, because:

1) It's pretty hard to argue we're seeing SUPERIOR coaching. Clearly, guys who aren't that great are not being coached up to something they're not.

2) We have unquestionably seen guys who have started strong (listed before) who have then regressed. Did they suddenly become less talented? That would seem to be schemes/coaching.

I think the point about these guys not finding success elsewhere is a fair one, as far as it goes. But cornerback is a funny position--it seems to depend on confidence and attitude to a greater degree than other positions. When these guys regressed and are then cut, they're not going to have a heck of a lot of swagger (to use a hated word) when they move on.

I don't know, just a thought.

2012 2 16 48 Tavon Wilson
2012 6 27 197 Nate Ebner
2012 7 17 224 Alfonzo Dennard
2011 2 1 33 Ras-I Dowling
2011 7 16 219 Malcolm William
2010 1 27 27 Devin McCourty
2009 2 2 34 Patrick Chung
2009 2 9 41 Darius Butler
2008 2 31 62 Terrence Wheatley
2008 4 30 129 Jonathan Wilhite
2007 1 24 24 Brandon Meriweather
2007 6 28 202 Mike Richardson
2006 7 21 229 Willie Andrews
2005 3 20 84 Ellis Hobbs
2005 4 32 133 James Sanders
2004 3 32 95 Guss Scott
2004 4 17 113 Dexter Reid
2004 7 32 233 Christian Morton
2003 2 4 36 Eugene Wilson
2003 4 23 120 Asante Samuel
2001 3 24 86 Brock Williams
2001 5 32 163 Hakim Akbar
2001 6 37 200 Leonard Myers
2000 6 21 187 Antwan Harris

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24 draft picks: 2 1sts, 6 2nds, 3 3rds, 4 4ths, 1 5th, 4 6ths and 4 7ths

Samuel
Wilson
Sanders
Hobbs
Meriweather
Chung
McCourty

are all that's really worked out to any appreciable degree, and the failures have been failures in places besides NE. Even the high picks have been failures.

To this point, it seems to be at least as much a talent issue as a coaching problem.

MrNathanDrake said:

Pass Rush deserves some of the blame.


Where was Ninkovich all game?

Actually, where has Ninkovich been all season?!?!

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He's 6'2, has a short reach, but he has a quick burst. Where is Jake?

I put a big part of the blame on the coaches.

The biggest issue I see is the corners don't play the ball, but play the receiver. I can't tell you how many times I have screamed at the TV yelling turn and look at the ball. I bet if I chart every game the past 5 years, I will find a game where a corner either took a penalty or got beat because of face guarding, or just losing track of the ball. It happened quite a few times in the Tennesse game, and we were lucky we didn't have the real refs, because they would have been flagged every time and the game would have been a lot closer.

That has to be coaching. When I played corner for a year in High School our coaches drilled in our head to play the ball, and for the life of me I can't figure out why the Pat coaches are not doing the same thing.

gmtaxi27 said:

I put a big part of the blame on the coaches.

The biggest issue I see is the corners don't play the ball, but play the receiver. I can't tell you how many times I have screamed at the TV yelling turn and look at the ball. I bet if I chart every game the past 5 years, I will find a game where a corner either took a penalty or got beat because of face guarding, or just losing track of the ball. It happened quite a few times in the Tennesse game, and we were lucky we didn't have the real refs, because they would have been flagged every time and the game would have been a lot closer.

That has to be coaching. When I played corner for a year in High School our coaches drilled in our head to play the ball, and for the life of me I can't figure out why the Pat coaches are not doing the same thing.

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This. A MILLION TIMES...THIS.

gmtaxi27 said:

I put a big part of the blame on the coaches.

The biggest issue I see is the corners don't play the ball, but play the receiver. I can't tell you how many times I have screamed at the TV yelling turn and look at the ball. I bet if I chart every game the past 5 years, I will find a game where a corner either took a penalty or got beat because of face guarding, or just losing track of the ball. It happened quite a few times in the Tennesse game, and we were lucky we didn't have the real refs, because they would have been flagged every time and the game would have been a lot closer.

That has to be coaching. When I played corner for a year in High School our coaches drilled in our head to play the ball, and for the life of me I can't figure out why the Pat coaches are not doing the same thing.

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A good example for this is the 3rd (or was it 4th) down conversion pass against the titans, for one the pats db got beat, bad, but he had no idea that the ball was in the air. He just stared at the receiver.

So let's see. Last year the Patriots had one of the worst defenses in the league. In the first 2 games, the defense played well and people were ranting about how good this defense could be. So we lose 2 games in a row by a total of 3 points. The last 3 games had many referee screwups which contribited to extending drives for the opponent. By all means lets fire the whole coaching staff because we are going to judge everyone by the last game. Man, I lnow fans can be fickle but can we get through the next 13 games before declaring this season a disaster.

Bill B. said:

By all means lets fire the whole coaching staff because we are going to judge everyone by the last game. Man, I lnow fans can be fickle but can we get through the next 13 games before declaring this season a disaster.

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Yes, exactly. We should fire the whole coaching staff.

There should be a strawman emoticon here....

aluminum seats said:

Yes, exactly. We should fire the whole coaching staff.

There should be a strawman emoticon here....

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I couldn't find a strawman emoticon. Will this do...

?

Our secondary has been suspect for several years now. However even in these last 2 games we were still in them and IMHO the O failed us. The way the plays are being called on offense it is like we are playing not to lose instead of playing to win. We used to go for the kill and put the games away and we have gotten away from that. Both the Arizona game and Baltimore game our play calling on offense in the 4th quarter got way too conservative. I am not fan of McDaniels and honestly believe we won't win a SB with him. His play calling contibutited greatly to our failure in SB 42 and was horrible in 46 too. We need to go for the jugular and stop ****yfooting around. We have the receiving weapons to open games up but we under utilize them.