VrabelJr
Veteran Starter w/Big Long Term Deal
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2011
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- 8,106
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The best way to completely unravel a team's offense is to greatly outmatch a team's OL. We've seen it time and time again. It's the only way to take a QB as good as Brady and make him look like JP Losman. Now that it's been a few days, I figured I'd go back and dig up what I could as well as remember what I saw.
The most interesting thing to me were the snap counts. Despite our OL getting beat off the blocks from snap 1 we stuck with the same OL combination the entire game. Here is a link to Mike Reiss' snap counts from the game: Slipping to No. 4 on depth chart, will Brandon LaFell be back with Patriots?
I think two things were obvious after the first two drives:
1) Denver's outside rushers were better than our OTs
2) Denver felt good enough about its inside DL that it was OK with letting their DEs and OLBs pin their ears back
Denver knew they could contain our run game with just their DTs and MLB despite their DEs/OLBs not honoring the run at all. What a significant advantage that is.
With the above in mind, we made a gigantic mistake by keeping Shaq Mason in the game. He's short with short arms and everyone knows his real value is in the run game. Without a doubt we would have been better off switching to a pass protecting interior of Kline/Andrews/Stork. Andrews is fast and smart and Stork has much better pass protection skills as a Guard than Mason does.
The next big mistake I believe we made was not using Michael Williams enough. Using essentially a 6th lineman like Williams does take one receiver off the field but let's take a look at our receivers:
1. Gronk
2. Edelman
3. White/Bolden
4. Martin/LaFell/Amendola/Chandler
The #4 receiving option is such a huge drop off from #3 that we would have been better off not even having any of them on the field just about ever. We could have kept Williams in as a 6th OL to chip Miller/Ware, help out in the run game a little and maybe even go out for a route or two just to keep Denver honest.
I strongly believe that if we inserted Andrews at C, moved Stork to G, pulled Mason and played Williams more that we could have won that game.
The most interesting thing to me were the snap counts. Despite our OL getting beat off the blocks from snap 1 we stuck with the same OL combination the entire game. Here is a link to Mike Reiss' snap counts from the game: Slipping to No. 4 on depth chart, will Brandon LaFell be back with Patriots?
I think two things were obvious after the first two drives:
1) Denver's outside rushers were better than our OTs
2) Denver felt good enough about its inside DL that it was OK with letting their DEs and OLBs pin their ears back
Denver knew they could contain our run game with just their DTs and MLB despite their DEs/OLBs not honoring the run at all. What a significant advantage that is.
With the above in mind, we made a gigantic mistake by keeping Shaq Mason in the game. He's short with short arms and everyone knows his real value is in the run game. Without a doubt we would have been better off switching to a pass protecting interior of Kline/Andrews/Stork. Andrews is fast and smart and Stork has much better pass protection skills as a Guard than Mason does.
The next big mistake I believe we made was not using Michael Williams enough. Using essentially a 6th lineman like Williams does take one receiver off the field but let's take a look at our receivers:
1. Gronk
2. Edelman
3. White/Bolden
4. Martin/LaFell/Amendola/Chandler
The #4 receiving option is such a huge drop off from #3 that we would have been better off not even having any of them on the field just about ever. We could have kept Williams in as a 6th OL to chip Miller/Ware, help out in the run game a little and maybe even go out for a route or two just to keep Denver honest.
I strongly believe that if we inserted Andrews at C, moved Stork to G, pulled Mason and played Williams more that we could have won that game.
