In the NFL, evasion is truly an artform.
It starts with Commissioner Roger Goodell, who turned his annual state-of-the-league news conference last week into a crash course on question-dodging, artfully ducking inquiries on Donald Trump, “Deflategate” and domestic-violence investigations. When asked why he hadn’t been to New England in over two seasons, Goodell even managed to dodge a question about dodging.
But at a Super Bowl where transcripts are mysteriously scrubbed to stay on message, there are no more deft virtuosos of sticking to the script than the two men Goodell would probably most like to avoid in Houston, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, who will team for their NFL-record seventh Super Bowl on Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons.
During a week in which many found it certifiably impossible to “stick to sports,” the Patriots coach and quarterback were unflappable in their dedication to the script. They gruffly sidestepped questions on politics, despite both inviting that scrutiny over the course of the past year. Belichick, who wrote a pre-election letter in support of Trump, took a question about underwear, while grumbling at several about the president. Brady, meanwhile, said he would rather “keep (his) focus where it should be” than discuss Goodell or his tacit headwear endorsement of Trump.
This is the Patriot Way at work, for better or worse. For years, the team’s ruthless adherence to the script has been a foundational tenet of its success. Nothing distracts from the plan. Not tapes of their opponent’s signals. Not deflated footballs. And certainly not Donald Trump.
Four Super Bowl titles later – and on the cusp of a fifth – the plan seems to be working. The Patriots are an unemotional, unimpeachable machine. Thanks to the best coach and best quarterback in NFL history, no team is better at keeping in control.
On the field, this same principle applies. Belichick’s game plan is built to dictate all facets of the game, to control every controllable. His Patriots, as a result, are the most well-schemed team in the NFL, and they impose their will on opponents by simply setting the game’s parameters to their strengths. Their opponents find themselves in a constant state of adjustment, and as soon as they allow the Patriots to seize full control, well … that’s usually all she wrote.
This is the challenge facing the Falcons on Sunday. Belichick will attempt to set the pace and keep the ball out of the hands of Atlanta’s historically good offense with a clock-controlling run game. He’ll up the tempo, playing no-huddle to keep the Falcons from subbing on their defensive front. As he often does, Belichick will do his best to scheme the Falcons’ best player, Julio Jones, out of the game entirely.
So to have any chance of winning their first Super Bowl, the Falcons will need to do what few teams have done successfully against the Patriots. They’ll need to disrupt Belichick’s plan and put Brady in uncomfortable circumstances that force him to respond. If New England, with the top scoring defense in football, is allowed to stay on script, Atlanta’s historic offense will only be window dressing in a Patriots win.
So how exactly does one go about outsmarting the NFL’s smartest coach or stopping its most unstoppable quarterback?
It’s not easy, but the blueprint isn’t hard to find. The Giants’ two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots offer up an obvious answer: Apply pressure on Brady.
Last season, in the AFC Championship, the Broncos followed this formula, knocking him down 17 times. Two weeks later, they won a Super Bowl. Manufacturing such pressure isn’t as easy as simply blitzing Brady into oblivion, though. Over the past three years, Brady’s passer rating against the blitz is a league-best 113.6. This season, he has been sacked just twice and hasn’t thrown an interception against extra pressure.
The Falcons have turned up their blitzing in recent weeks with impressive success – 53 percent of their blitzes this postseason have recorded a pressure, which would’ve ranked best in the NFL this season. But the Patriots’ offense gets the ball out blazingly fast, and the Falcons’ four-man front is nowhere near as imposing as the 2007 Giants or 2015 Broncos.
The Patriots’ defense will face a similar challenge, as MVP Matt Ryan is the only quarterback in the NFL who has been better than Brady against a four-man rush. Forcing the Falcons into unmanageable third-and-longs is probably the Patriots’ best hope of neutralizing the NFL’s best offense, but no quarterback has been better on the game’s most crucial down than Ryan. Since Atlanta’s Week 12 bye, Ryan has completed 55 of 67 passes when faced with third down.
The Falcons also have Jones at their disposal, and while the Patriots will certainly double him, his mere presence will offer plenty of mismatches to exploit on New England’s defense. With at least two defenders focused on Jones, coordinator Kyle Shanahan will hope to manufacture one-on-one matchups for his two dynamic running backs, Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman, who ranked among the NFL’s best pass-catchers at the position. The sheer multiplicity of the Falcons’ offense is what made them so dangerous this season, and that won’t change Sunday.
That said, Belichick has already planned a counter move to this. And then, a counter to the next counter. With two-deep zone coverages, the Patriots will do their best to limit big plays, which have been hallmark to Atlanta’s historic offensive success. They’ll rely on their top-rated run defense to force Ryan into compromising situations on later downs. And once they’ve done that, the Patriots’ defense will do its best to lull Ryan into a mistake.
It’s no exaggeration to say that a turnover could swing the entire Super Bowl. Out of 50 Super Bowls, the winner has won the turnover battle 88 percent of the time. The Patriots and Falcons tied for the NFL low in giveaways (11) this season, which combined, would still put them below 16 other teams. So just one deviation from the plan, on either side, could change everything.
That’s what the Falcons will be counting on. With all things equal between two nearly perfect teams, the Patriots’ experience in the Super Bowl gives them an inherent advantage. They have Brady. They have Belichick. And they’ll have a plan for pretty much every move Atlanta makes.
But the Falcons have Ryan, Jones, and an offense that ranks among the top five in NFL history. They are dominant on first and third down. They rarely make mistakes. And their defense has been improving all postseason.
If all goes according to the plan, New England will win this Super Bowl. But as the NFL proved this week, even when it comes to the evasive Patriots, scripts are often meant to be tampered with.
Contact the writer: rkartje@scng.com
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
