Pats Pulpit: Belichick, Iowa State, and the future of defensive football

borg said:

I would love to know what kind of interactions NE has with college staffs that successfully deploy new schemes. Does BB ever bring home in a college staff and spend a day brain storming... with both sides sharing?
I would also like to know how much credit Flores deserves for the creativity we saw last year. This casual observer felt Patricia’s schemes were risk averse compared to last year.

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I think Flores deserves the same credit regardless of how much outside info he deploys. It's up to the guy who's dealing with the every day to successfully deploy anything. Sort of a link between scheme and execution. There's always deploying the learned scheme on the guys you happen to have.

I would not be surprised if BB knew either Campbell (HC at Iowa St.) or Heacock (DC). Campbell was once asked by Pioli to interview for a job with the Pats.

I'm not very football smart but...isn't this 3-3-5 scheme nearly perfect? You can stop the pass with 5 DBs and 3 coverage LBs, and you can stop the run with 3 LBs and 3 DL. Sure the lack of pass rush is problematic if you are only rushing three but if you can draw up some creative blitzes that won't be as big of an issue. It looks like by far the most versatile scheme and is perfect to defend against the current NFL where passing reigns supreme. I suppose if teams start using I-formation more to run over this defense but in this day and age? Probably not.

Flash said:

I'm not very football smart but...isn't this 3-3-5 scheme nearly perfect? You can stop the pass with 5 DBs and 3 coverage LBs, and you can stop the run with 3 LBs and 3 DL. Sure the lack of pass rush is problematic if you are only rushing three but if you can draw up some creative blitzes that won't be as big of an issue. It looks like by far the most versatile scheme and is perfect to defend against the current NFL where passing reigns supreme. I suppose if teams start using I-formation more to run over this defense but in this day and age? Probably not.

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Not many teams have the personnel to stop a power run game. I'm pretty sure even fewer have the oline requisite to attack with one either.

Then there's BB. His team ran to win, and dismantled the "vaunted" rush-first attack of the Rams (if anyone saw the Chicago game, Mack dominated and the Rams moved backwards as often as they did forwards. Gurley didn't do ****. Probably more overrated than vaunted, tbh). You'd have thought McVay would have had a solution. He didn't. He did the same thing he did against Chicago, he stuck to "his" offense, and continued to be smothered. Yet another example of why the amorphous NE gameplan style often evicerates the Dungey-esque "we know our gameplan so well, you can't stop it."

When BB and co hit a wall, they gather, figure out the issues, and implement ways to attack it. When your game is predicated on knowing and executing one style flawlessly, there is no plan b.

Great read, adds a lot of valuable context to Belichick's love for pseudo-LB safeties that he's clearly targeted and placed a ton of emphasis on going back to Harrison.

It's funny reading about a defensive philosophy that's basically predicated on gap integrity, DEs who can play inside as needed, LBs who can take on guards, and a versatile safety who can play LB as the next great innovation coming out of the college game. I'm pretty sure that's basically what we've been seeing here in New England for almost two decades, and for better or worse the Pats have just about always been willing to sacrifice a good amount of raw speed from their LBs and even some of their safeties (hello Jordan Richards) to do it. The specifics change, but as general principles go those have all been near-constant points of emphasis here.

Flash said:

I'm not very football smart but...isn't this 3-3-5 scheme nearly perfect? You can stop the pass with 5 DBs and 3 coverage LBs, and you can stop the run with 3 LBs and 3 DL. Sure the lack of pass rush is problematic if you are only rushing three but if you can draw up some creative blitzes that won't be as big of an issue. It looks like by far the most versatile scheme and is perfect to defend against the current NFL where passing reigns supreme. I suppose if teams start using I-formation more to run over this defense but in this day and age? Probably not.

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I think you pretty much keyed in on the main issue with this scheme, which is that it requires some exceptional coaching to generate pass rush and a ton of versatility coming from your safeties, linebackers, and DEs. If you have the personnel to run it, then yeah it kicks ass, but most teams don't. And if this becomes the next hot defensive trend in the NFL, most teams won't have it.

inda like how the Pats' and Steelers' success running two very different styles of 3-4 in the early 2000s led to like half the league adopting it as a base defense while the smarter teams flipped back since the vast majority of high schools and colleges were still producing 4-3 talent. I think that's the bigger story here: innovators get to target players that other teams aren't targeting, so by virtue of supply and demand they're able to sign/draft superior talent compared to teams that are targeting the same guys everyone else is. Also a big part of why Belichick is smart to spend so much time working closely with college coaches; these are the guys developing the talent that's coming into the league, so if you want to get production out of young guys you have to be able to work with what they're doing.

reamer said:

Exceptional article. Well worth the read, although it's a bit long.

Bill Belichick, Iowa State and the future of defensive football

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Best observation in that article:

“Recently the trend was to make 4-2-5 the base defense in the NFL, given how often teams utilized 11 offensive personnel on offense. ”

Mmm. Yeah. How often was that? And what does that have to do with defensive alignment? Same alignment would probably work when they didn’t have eleven offensive players on the field.

n6249c said:

Best observation in that article:

“Recently the trend was to make 4-2-5 the base defense in the NFL, given how often teams utilized 11 offensive personnel on offense. ”

Mmm. Yeah. How often was that? And what does that have to do with defensive alignment? Same alignment would probably work when they didn’t have eleven offensive players on the field.

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Hah. They mean vs 12 or 21 or 22 personnel packages. Here's a nice article with pictures to break it down: Football 101 - Offensive Personnel Packages Common in the NFL

reamer said:

Hah. They mean vs 12 or 21 or 22 personnel packages. Here's a nice article with pictures to break it down: Football 101 - Offensive Personnel Packages Common in the NFL

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Yeah, I knew that, but it was still enough to cause a double take at first glance so I had to make fun of the terminology. Hoping to confuse the unwRy...

venecol said:

Its articles like this that lead me to lean towards BB as the answer to the age old question of who is the main reason for the Pats success: BB or Brady? I mean, Brady is the GOAT but there is so much more involved in the game as stated by @patfanken that makes it at least a 60-40 factor in favor of BB. Not trying to derail the thread going down this road, it's just my opinion, as I'm sure there are 100s of different ones out there.

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You need both a coach that can scheme and keep the schemes fresh year after year, and a quarterback that can execute the schemes at a high enough level to keep defenses off balance.

Part of the genius of Belichick is that Brady can cover his weaknesses by executing in any kind of offense he's asked to do. Very, very few quarterbacks have ever been capable of being that versatile... usually it's more like, you find a single style a quarterback can play and just try to make subtle adjustments to keep defenses honest. With Brady, we've run just about every style of offense out there. And instead of being the limiting factor that forces the offense to go in a certain direction, Brady executes whatever he's expected to do, at a high level, allowing the offense to be constantly reinvented based on what other personnel were on the field.