New England Patriots > Patriots Blog
(PHOTO: George Walker IV / Tennessean.com via Imagn Content Services, LLC) Good morning, and here are our Sunday Patriots news and notes for this week.
Well, the 2023 NFL Draft is in the books…the team has signed a few UDFAs, and with off-season activities moving onto the field, the first part of team and chemistry building gets started.
The offense, especially, has a lot of work to do as the system is getting a much-needed revamp, returning to what the Patriots always did well under Bill O’Brien. One player who is expected to benefit greatly is TE Mike Gesicki. He had a fantastic 2021 under former O’Brien assistant and OC George Godsey, who ran the same style of offense as O’Brien does.
Phil Perry of NBC Sports Boston spoke to a Patriots’ rival defensive coach who was very bullish about the addition of Gesicki to the Patriots’ offense.
“He told me that he thinks that Gesicki’s gonna catch the ball a ‘bleep-ton’. And part of it is he believes in Gesicki’s skill set. Now, he’s not a true tight end. He’s at the bottom of the league in terms of blocking at that position. But he’s still a freaky athlete. He can function in the red zone; he can be a vertical threat down the middle of the field.
“And this coach thought that was important for both Mac Jones and Bill O’Brien. When O’Brien was here last, he showed he could dominate the middle of the field. They had better personnel back then, but with Mac Jones, his strength is in the middle of the field as well. So, if he can get a vertical threat down the middle of the field, which Gesicki is, I think he could end up being the one pass-catcher in their offense that defenses actually have to gameplan for. To me, he might be the only guy who fits that category.”
He might just be a movable chess piece as a tight end that they move around to create mismatches and even use him as a big wide receiver.
But Kendrick Bourne and Tyquan Thornton, who begins Year 2 in the system, will both be expected to perform much better, especially considering how the offense as a whole was constructed and utilized a year ago. One big question offensively is James Robinson. Is he fully healthy from his injury now? If so, he brings an element of running and receiving out of the backfield. Ditto for Ty Montgomery.
However, I wouldn’t forget about Pierre Strong this season. He has tremendous speed out of the backfield in the passing game. Perhaps we’ll see a return of the wheel routes that used to be so successful.
Quick Hitters For the Patriots and NFL News:
Joe “AT&T” Montana: The 49er’s great QB was nicknamed “Joe Cool” for a reason. You rarely, if ever, get flustered in a game during his illustrious career. How cool was Montana during the games? He was cool enough to call his wife from the sideline.
It is true. Montana found a way to call using the sideline phone. He recently told the story on the NFL’s Instagram account, which was corroborated by his wife, Jennifer.
After tossing a TD, he spoke to his OC and then thought, “I don’t know what made me do it, but one day I hung up, and I’m sitting there going, ‘Hmm, I wonder if these things call out?’ So I pick up the phone and hit — what do you do normally? You hit 9, right? It gives you an outside line. I hit 9, got a dial tone.”
“I’m on the sideline phone. I found out that it calls, so I thought I’d give you a call since I’m just sitting here waiting to go on the field,” Montana told his wife.
That is hilarious, and Montana would try it in every stadium he played in around the league. How can you not love a player like that? Check out the video in the link above.
MNF Booth Change: ESPN is changing their #2 announcing play-by-play announcer for the upcoming season. Steve Levy had handled that duty, but he is being replaced by their top college football announcer Chris Fowler.
It is unknown if Levy’s two partners in the telecast, analysts Louis Riddick and Dan Orlovsky, will continue this season or be replaced as well. The network’s #1 team consists of Al Michaels and Troy Aikman, who came over from Fox a year ago.
Fowler’s #2 team will call five games during the 2023 season, according to a contract that ESPN signed with the NFL in 2021.
Patriots 4th & 2 Podcast: If you haven’t checked out our PatsFans.com podcast, “Patriots 4th & 2”, in a bit, please check it out. Russ is taking some time off. However, Derek and I broke down the draft picks for the team and gave a quick analysis of each. Please check it out.
Russ Francis/Chuck Fairbanks: The former Patriot tight end and head coach both should be in the Patriots team Hall of Fame, and the fact that especially Francis isn’t is an absolute travesty. Francis and the Raiders’ Dave Casper changed the game with how teams used the tight end position…this will be on our Sunday posts until it happens.
Belichick Deception Misled NFL Media, Teams —
Patriots head coach Bill Belichick must be a reader of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” which became a cult thing again to read after Tony Soprano made it fashionable for non-military types to learn the art of winning strategy.
Belichick no doubt read it as a youngster at the Naval Academy. A couple of quotes can be directly tied to Belichick’s actions during the draft, where he fooled other teams and the media as to what his true extensions were.
Sun Tzu’s quotes are perfect examples of Belichick’s following the principles that the Chinese general put down during his lifetime, which is believed to have been between 544-496 BCE.
“All warfare is based on deception… (in this case, the warfare would be the NFL)
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
So, after this rather long-winded introduction, what the hell is the point, you ask? Well, Belichick made this offseason an elaborate ruse designed to mislead everyone about what his intentions were. His refusal to name Mac Jones the #1 QB set off a ton of rumors (possibly planted disinformation?) that the team was seriously contemplating a QB taken with the 14th pick in the draft. And that the team was actively shopping him.
Continuing with the ploy, the Patriots also made a lot of interest known in Zay Flowers, the WR from BC. Everyone, well nearly everyone, was convinced that the Patriots were going all in for offense early in the draft.
In our podcast, Derek Havens and I discussed my sneaking suspicion that the team was going defense with the 1st round pick. But to be clear, there was no way I thought it would be THREE defensive picks in the first three rounds.
Mike Sando of The Athletic, in his Friday column, quoted an NFL exec who had this to say about Belichick’s moves.
“They are saying it was never a personnel problem around the quarterback,” the exec said. “It is classic Bill, building strength on strength, so he just brings in top players on defense.”
“Gonzalez moves so well; you buy into the potential even when the production isn’t quite there,” the exec added. “He is going to DB heaven in New England. You would think Belichick would get the best from him. He is also going to play a ton of man-to-man, so that will be interesting. You are going to be on a true island. He has the physical talent to do it, but if you start getting beat, where does your head go? That will be interesting.”
What it means is that Belichick doesn’t believe the problems offensively last year had to do with the players, especially the QB. It had much more to do with the coaching and why the biggest offensive addition this offseason has been Bill O’Brien.
After the draft was over, Belichick was asked several times about the status of Jones as the starting QB of the team. He was finally asked, “Is Mac Jones your QB right now?”
“Yeah, I mean, look, Mac’s been our quarterback for two years. As I tell the team every year, each player, each coach, we all have to re-establish and prove ourselves every year. That’s what this league is. So that’s for all of us.2023 is 2023, and we’ll see how it goes.”
Asked further if Belichick still felt as he did a year ago when he was so confident in Jones, Belichick responded, “Absolutely.”
As a result, teams were expecting Belichick to zig when he had every intention of zagging. The Patriots were expected to do a lot of things that they absolutely didn’t in this year’s draft. Now we know that it was by design.
Will it work? We won’t know the answer to that for several months. Getting an accurate picture of a typical draft class takes two to three years. But the league has changed and turned into the “What have you done lately?”
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“Well, I think the first thing was being there and knowing what to do. That was something that was important for me, going in and learning the defense. You know, we laughed with Rob Ryan yesterday over text, but Ted Johnson was in there, obviously, and Tedy [Bruschi] and Willie [McGinest] and Roman Phifer were a part of that group that signed in 2001.
“But really, Ted and Tedy and Willie were the players that taught me what it was like, and I wanted to impress them by how much I knew and what I was able to do on the field. And I was trying to earn their respect by obviously playing well and being able to communicate the defense and talk through things, and then we laughed with Rob Ryan yesterday. I said, Rob, you have one of the greatest lines I’ve ever heard from a coach. He used to say, ‘Well, if the head coach asked, we covered it,’ and we all would laugh and run out of there, and he was referring to, if Bill [Belichick] ever asked like, ‘Hey, what are these guys doing?’ Rob would be like, ‘Well, we covered it.’
“And me and Tedy and Ted and Willie would all laugh. So, that’s what I remember, going into that room and in old Foxboro Stadium, meeting with those guys, and really in the spring, just trying to earn their respect.
“I tried to prove that I belong there. I think every day, every week, I wanted to try to be there and be productive and know as many positions as I could and play special teams and embrace playing special teams. Learning from guys like Bill and learning the history of football from Ernie Adams, learning special teams from Brad Seely, watching Dante Scarnecchia coach and the passion and what he put into it.
“Obviously, the defensive coaches that we had, Dean Pees, Romeo Crennel, Eric Mangini, Rob Ryan, Pepper Johnson, all these guys that we got to be associated with. It was fun coming to work. Obviously, winning makes it fun, but it was something that we’re all better off for having spent time there.
Tennessee Titans head coach and former Patriots linebacker Mike Vrabel on a conference call with the media after learning that he’d been inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame.
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“Talent sets the floor; Character sets the ceiling.” Bill Belichick
Follow me on Twitter @SteveB7SFG or email me at [email protected]
Listen to our Patriots 4th and 2 podcasts on Stitcher and Streamyard as Russ Goldman, Derek Havens, and myself from PatsFans.com discuss the latest Patriots news and game analysis.
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