Professional sports is a very “monkey see, monkey do” type of industry. Organizations always are trying to hop on the latest fashionable trend throughout their sport. It will either become the norm, a la the shift in Major League Baseball, or fall by the wayside like the dubious Wildcat offense in the NFL. The saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it is puzzling that more teams in the nation’s most popular sport don’t feel the need to set the New England Patriots as their team to emulate. The hater or casual observer would most likely veer off onto a vitriolic tangent about cheating and such, but the results speak for themselves. “Gate” practices aside, there are plenty more things that the Patriots do with great regularity that should aggravate you so much more. It shouldn’t particularly grind your gears that the defending Super Bowl champs do them, but more that your team doesn’t.
THE QUARTERBACK SNEAK
After the 2013 season, The NFL Outsiders put together a piece on the effectiveness, yet shocking under-use of the quarterback sneak in short yardage situations. It is a point that I have been trying to make for years after watching week after week teams trying fruitless fade patterns and running the ball into the line with the running back in 3rd-and-1 & 4th-and-1 scenarios. The one team that consistently puts the ball in the hand of their quarterback and tells him to dive forward is the New England Patriots. Throughout the league, the quarterback position has more freak, built like a tank athletes than it has ever had before. Yet each Sunday, you will see a slew of 3rd-and-short opportunities ending in the team punting it away a play later after a head-scratching play call. The Patriots use the sneak nearly three times as much as their closest rivals (Carolina & San Francisco), and those numbers could be viewed as skewed because the number of designed runs implemented in each of those team’s offenses for their mobile quarterbacks. In my eyes, it is the number one thing that teams could easily rip off from the Patriots, but so many shockingly choose not to.
STICKING WITH WHAT IS WORKING
This should be a no-brainer but sadly it isn’t. No team in football shifts their play calling commitment more than the New England Patriots. That notion is one that can be applied to more fields than just football, but it is one that is routinely overlooked, underutilized, or just plain scrapped. Most head coaches believe they are the smartest men in the room and attempt to engage in the proverbial game of human chess with their opposition. Recognize the man above? That is Jonas Gray. You may not remember him, but Patriots fans (and Colts fans like myself) certainly do. He rushed 37 times for 201 yard at Lucas Oil Field in November 2014, a domed stadium. Domed stadiums are where passing is king, but on this day (and for most days since) the Colts defense was unable to stop the run. So instead of keeping up “balance” and “run sheets”, the Patriots ran the ball down Indy’s throat until they proved they could stop it. 4 TDs for Gray and 42 points later the proof was in the pudding that they couldn’t. The opposite proved true over the team’s first two games of this season. Even with leads in both games against Pittsburgh and Buffalo, the Patriots stuck with the passing game. It is normal to try to burn clock in the second half with the run, but frankly neither Pittsburgh or Buffalo could stop Tom Brady and company. They bucked conventional wisdom and went with what WORKED. A novel concept, I know.
BREED CONTINUITY
So many clubs in the NFL go year to year having to undergo massive roster overhauls as well as front office and coaching changes. A revolving door of coordinators with differing philosophies mixed with impatient ownership and ill-fitting players predictably leads to disaster. Since the current Pats regime took hold, the overall organizational philosophy hasn’t changed. It never hurts to have two future Hall of Famers at head coach and quarterback, but continuity maintenance is more than just those two positions. It is having successors in line properly prepared to replace a potential defection. As all of Belichick’s disciples from their early Super Bowl runs left town, from Charlie Weis to Eric Mangini, the Patriots never skipped a beat. As the old guard on both sides of the ball started to show their age, holes were plugged with like-for-like drafting. These may sound like common sense practices, but they are anything but in the National Football League. Too often a lack of even the shortest amount of foresight in any facet of the game can lead to a cyclical vortex of mediocrity that can send a team into a hole that not even the most talented of executives can pull them out of.
A wise man once said that parity isn’t created by increased competition, it is created by fear of being miserable and not taking the risks to be exceptional. These are just three things that the Patriots do, simple things, that allow them to remain consistently excellent in a sport where their infrastructure is designed to prevent such. As the rest of us NFL fans try to conjure up complex reasons why these “cheaters” are so far ahead of everyone else, we should instead be trying to get our teams to be more like them. In a league that is filled with copycats, the Patriots have been seemingly flying under the radar while wearing camouflage and writing their playbooks in invisible ink. Until the rest of us catch up, we’re going to have to keep yapping about whatever the next “gate” is as a smokescreen.