Film Snapshots: Patriots QBs Mac Jones vs Bailey Zappe
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New England Patriots > Patriots Blog
One thing that’s been interesting to follow has been Dan Orlovsky’s breakdown of the spacing in New England’s offense, with Orlovsky pointing out an interesting fact as it pertains to some of the issues that have made things challenging for Mac Jones in recent weeks.
Orlovsky pointed out that when the quarterback gets to the back of his drop, oftentimes, players haven’t even turned their heads yet, forcing Jones to hold the ball slightly longer than he wants and given the issues on the offensive line, it’s at times caused some problems.
The next argument has obviously centered around the success Bailey Zappe had during his outings, with many believing that things weren’t all that different. Zappe has been terrific during his time filling in, with Matt Patricia calling things a little differently while focusing in on Zappe’s strengths based on how things shaped up on film.
Below are snapshots of each quarterback in their respective last performances, with snapshots from both when they reached the end of their respective drops on non-run plays. The player circled is the player each quarterback ultimately targeted on the play, which essentially gives a little more context to what each one has had to deal with and how things looked when they reached the end of their dropback prior to when they threw the football.
Given that this has become such a hot-button topic, I’m also going to leave out any additional commentary for the sake of allowing people to simply get an overall view of the offense as a whole for both players.
These are in chronological order in terms of how they came up in the game, so they’re not direct comparisons of each play. Just an overall picture from the two games of each quarterback to hopefully at least shine some light on things, especially the spacing issues that do stand out a little more after looking at things. Greg Bedard of Boston Sports Journal and Evan Lazar of Patriots.com have done a good job of getting into the X’s and O’s in recent weeks, so I would recommend checking both of those guys out for a deeper look.
For the sake of copyright, these are only screenshots from the All-22, not video or animated images and you can click on each image to view the larger version. Still, this should at least provide some context to this discussion as we head into the end of the club’s bye week.
Feel free to leave your thoughts on what you see on these plays, and whether or not you found this interesting.