Excellent question and yes, absolutely maddening to watch at times. I think it’s fair to question this tactic, and I don’t really have a good answer for why they continue to run this off-man style of coverage at times.
The simplest guess is that it’s part of the bend-don’t-break style the Pats have been fond of. But the problem in the last few years is that the defense is breaking. They’re getting beat long more than ever. So if you’re bending and breaking you’re not really doing anything. But perhaps the first step should be to shore up deep pass defense and then worry about giving up the short stuff because the corners are five yards off the receiver at the snap.
There’s absolutely no question that Belichick has a conservative defensive philosophy overall, he’s never going to be one to dial up major blitzes and take an overly aggressive approach. He prefers disguise and picking his spots, and forcing continued execution by the opponent.
So on some level we just have to accept that, but it certainly seems clear that they need to be more careful about when and where they use this off-man technique for their corners. Either they’re not equipped to effectively run it, or the quality of quarterbacks is too good now.
The real head scratcher about it is that Brady must be eating it up in practice as well, so I’m not sure where they see it working. It would be nice to see more press man, but we saw the experiment go up in flames last year. We’d wondered if Ras-I Dowling might make a difference this year and allow them to experiment a little more with that this year but obviously he’s been missing in action.
So ultimately this is year three of the Chung/Arrington/McCourty trio. The front seven is showing signs of coming together, but if the back end can’t do the same there need to be changes, whether it’s personnel, scheme or both.