PatsPropaganda

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Patriots Thursday workout wrap-up

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The Pats were back on the field at Boston College on Thursday and the media was there too. Well, they were outside the stadium with long-lens cameras and binoculars trying to discern just what the hell was going on as you can see below…

What bums me out most about this, is that my favorite part of mini-camps, especially right after the draft, is seeing all the new players and their choices in equipment. For the past three years we’ve done the “Rookie Eyeball Test” posts and they’re always a highlight of the post-draft void. Alas we can do nothing but wait unless one of the reporters to the left got a good shot of Solder, Ras-I or their rookie pals.

Here are the nuggets and observations that we’ve gathered thus far from the various media outlets.

Kevin Faulk was out there and looked by all accounts like he was well on his way to being fully recovered from the ACL injury he suffered against the Jets in week two.

Ryan Mallett delivered what some would call a “highlight” when he connected with WR Matthew Slater for a 65-yard bomb into the corner of the endzone and out of the reach of the safety covering. No, it wasn’t with pads or anything. But it was a pretty impressive throw.

Rapsheet also reports Darius Butler worked a lot in the slot. It’s really his best chance to make the team at this point. He looked just as out of place as an outside corner at the end of the season as he did at the start. Personally I think he’s a longshot to make the team at this point assuming Wilhite comes back okay.

Rob Ninkovich told Mike Reiss: “It’s huge for us to just come together. Whenever this lockout is over with, if you don’t get together, that’s months of not being with your teammates. So it’s good to just kind of get a little jump-start on some things, especially for the younger guys it’s going to help them.”

Rapsheet also reports that Tom Brady looked great after his off-season foot surgery: He was planting and throwing just like normal, which was really a positive sign. There was no limp and no sign of anything. Sounds like it worked well rushing into surgery right after the season ended.

Chris Price summed the session up as such:

The whole affair — which wrapped up in about 90 minutes — had the feel of a June T-shirt and shorts affair held behind Gillette Stadium. Not quite as slow as a walkthrough and not quite a haf-speed practice, we’ll call it almost quarter-speed. The players had a chance to work up a bit of a sweat (mostly during the 7-on-7s and two-minute sessions toward the end of practice), but in truth, it was more a chance to get back to football-related activity.

We’re still expecting some more posts from the beat crew, including a Mike Wright interview with Tom E. Curran that should be good. More to come on what could possibly be the last day of real Patriots news until August or even September…

Belichick on the Air Coryell & West Coast Offenses

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Found this nugget from an old BB press conference. Interesting to hear him talk about the two offensive systems that he doesn’t use. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true, there are surely concepts from these offenses that BB has plucked for his own modified version of the Erhardt-Perkins offense.

Q: The “Air Coryell” offense of the early eighties, was that an extension of what Paul Brown came up with?

BB: Yeah. I would say it’s an extension, yes. I would say it would come from that tree.

Q: Do you ever look back and study the tape of what Paul Brown did and use that in your offense at all?

BB: Well, again, basically what Paul [Brown] did was he ran the west coast offense. What’s called today the west coast offense, that was really Paul’s offense. As that has spread through the league. There are a lot of different versions of it, from [Mike] Holmgren, who is probably the purist. His offense is probably most like what San Francisco ran back in the ‘80s with Bill Walsh. Then you have Andy [Reid] and Jon Gruden, all the different offshoots that come out of that, [Mike] McCarthy, basically the whole NFC North, right? Green Bay. So, there’s a lot of offshoots of that and they have their own individual adaptations of it. For example, I-Formation was a very minimal part of that offense as Bill Walsh ran it, not as Paul Brown ran it. Paul ran a lot of “I” when he had [Paul] Robinson and Ickey [Woods] and those guys. He ran a lot of that I-Formation. So each coach has modified it a little bit.

Q: Is what [Don] Coryell ran considered the west coast offense?

BB: No. I think there are elements of it, yeah, but it was a much more downfield passing game and less replacing runs with those drive routes, the underneath crossing patterns, the wide routes by the backs, a lot of slants, the plays that come with a high frequency in the west coast offense. A lot of those are really replacements for runs. The Coryell passing attack is much more of a downfield passing game.

Q: When you went up against that, how did you try to stop it?

BB: The Coryell teams? Well Don’s offense when he was out at San Diego, that was one of the most explosive offenses I had seen, and still have. They had Kellen Winslow, Chuck Muncie and then the receivers were [Wes] Chandler, [John] Jefferson and [Charlie] Joiner. And they had Dan Fouts and they also had a real good offensive line, too. They were good. Then Joe Gibbs really took the Coryell offense, which was mainly a one-back offense -as opposed to the west coast offense, which had some one back but it was really more of a two-back offense than a one-back offense-and Gibbs took the Coryell system and, obviously, when he went to Washington, had great success with it. Then that spread to Dan Henning and Joe Bugel and guys like that who went on to be head coaches and took that offense with them. I think that the Joe Gibbs offense is much closer related to the Coryell offense than the west coast offense is.

Q: If the Coryell Chargers had won that 41-38 game against the Dolphins, would that have changed how that offense was used moving forward?

BB: I don’t know. I don’t think anyone ever thought that offense wasn’t a good offense, whether they had scored 38 in that game or 44. But a lot of that goes with other teams hiring people from that system or leaving it and going to the next team and taking the offense with them. It’s like what we’ve seen out of San Diego this year. We of course played the Jets, which was [Brian] Schottenheimer, then we played San Diego, which actually wasn’t San Diego, it was Norv Turner, but it was San Diego because there was a lot of carryover there. Then we played Buffalo, which was San Diego, and then we played Cleveland, which was [Rob] Chudzinski, and that was San Diego. Now we’re playing Cam [Cameron] and that’s San Diego. The Norv influence between San Diego and Dallas with [Jason] Garrett there, in seven games we’ve had a lot of similarity in the offensive systems that we’ve seen, predominantly San Diego but to an extent the Norv Turner system, which is somewhat similar to the San Diego system. Again, that is a function of those coordinators and head coaches going from one system into another and taking it with them. That’s just like it was with [Bill] Walsh, [George] Seifert, [Mike] Holmgren, [Jon] Gruden, Ray Rhodes and then all the other disciples that have come through, too, like [Mike] McCarthy and those guys, Dennis Green. They all took the west coast with them. So it was prevalent and in terms of league-wide it was used in high percentages throughout the season. I can’t remember exactly how the Coryell system went, but my sense of it was that it didn’t break apart too much. Now when Gibbs went to Washington then it was Dan Henning, although his coaches stayed together for the most part for quite a while. Bugel went to Arizona. Who else? But [Don] Coryell and Sid Gillman, that was a very well thought out and excellent passing system with a lot of production.

Charlie Weis’ impact on the Erhardt-Perkins system

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Charlie Weis’ impact on the Erhardt-Perkins system

This article is also a good short breakdown of the other two primary ancestors of modern offensive football: The Air Coryell system and the West Coast system. A little bit on both:

Air Coryell

The Air Coryell offense is one that is being used by a handful of teams in the league today. Oakland and San Diego use it, New Orleans runs a variation of it along with some Erhardt-Perkins, and Chicago will be using it this year now that Mike Martz is the offensive coordinator in Chicago. It’s an offense that was created by Sid Gillman back in the 60′s while with the Chargers. Later Don Coryell perfected it or made it what it eventually became remembered for while with the Chargers in the 70′s and 80′s. Another notable name to be associated with this offense is none other than Al Davis who was an assistant under Sid Gillman and took the offense to Oakland. The offense is based on timing and precession with the emphasis being on deep passes to stretch the field, and make the defense over commit to certain aspects of the passing attack.

West Coast Offense

The West Coast offense utilizes short, horizontal passing plays to stretch the defense, which then enables them to have bigger run plays and longer passes. Typical plays happen within ten to fifteen yards of the line of scrimmage. By the quarterback taking short drops, it makes the defense focus on the intermediate short routes & not on the running backs coming out of the backfield. The term “West Coast” is a term that Bill Parcells gave the offense back in 1985 after the Giants beat the 49ers in the playoffs. As people know, Parcells believes in hard nose football and tough defense over finesse football which everyone said the 49ers played finesse football back then.

Finally we have how Charlie Weis set the stage for Josh McDaniels to take the Erhardt-Perkins offense to contain elements of a modern spread.

Charlie Weis can be credited for installing the heavily modified version of this offense that we see in New England and Denver. His version of the offense became the complicated, very intricate and versatile passing attack that we have witnessed over the past ten years. He even went as far as to run five wide out sets a lot during the course of a game which was unheard of back in the day when Erhardt and Perkins created this offense. Weis left for Notre Dame which open the door for the young protege Josh McDaniels to run what he had learned under Weis as the QB coach in New England. Josh took it to another level back in 2007 with Randy Moss, Wes Welker and Donte Stallworth. He made the offense almost exclusively a spread offense that teams weren’t ready for nor knew how to stop with Moss & Welker needing to be double teamed. In leau of the expanded wide open passing attack, he was able to keep the running game portion of this offense a key component in the Patriots record breaking season.

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In Weis’s system, though, there is less to throw out than with many other NFL teams. Weis is more a believer in matchups than trickery, as is head coch Bill Belichick. He believes more in formations and player groupings than the foolproofness of any play in his playbook, a marked departure from a place like San Francisco, where they might have 55-100 plays on a list for any game and 400 or more in a playbook that looked like Volume A of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

By contrast, Weis’s looks more like Volume V. There’s still plenty there, it’s just a little thinner and easier to carry, both by hand and in your mind.

“San Francisco could call 400 plays,” Weis said. “I have a different philosophy. I think you can cut down on the plays and get different looks from your formations and who’s in them. It’s easier for the players to learn. It’s easier for the quarterback to learn. You get different looks without changing his reads. You don’t need an open-ended number of plays.”

https://www.patspropaganda.com/in-weiss-system-though-there-is-less-to-throw/

Ideal lineman for the Erhardt-Perkins offensive system

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Ideal lineman for the Erhardt-Perkins offensive system

Good article here with another fundamental breakdown of the offense, but what I’d like to focus on are the types of offensive lineman required to run it because clearly this is still very much a part of the system.

This system uses bigger offensive lineman and typically bigger Running Backs who can sustain running between the tackles on a regular basis. The Offensive Tackles and Guards in this system typically “Pull” and “Trap”. What this means is, on a Running play that is designed to run to the right, let’s say in the B Gap or between the Guard and Tackle on the Right Side, the Left Guard will quickly leave his original position and become the lead blocker for the Running Back. This type of Rushing attack usually requires big Offensive Lineman who will be able to handle a large Defensive Tackle head on.

Hmmm, big, athletic offensive lineman? Clearly Vollmer and Solder are perfect examples.

Schein: Patriots #4 in Franchise Rankings

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Schein: Patriots #4 in Franchise Rankings

I’m kind of upset that on “intangibles”, which includes fan support, the Pats are ranked for 10th. Perhaps my blog, podcast, and general Patriots obsession could sway Schein up to a 9 for us? That’d move the Pats into a tie for 3rd. Though I can’t complain too much, the Jets have a 6 for intangibles. 

4. NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS: 54.5

  • Owner: 10
  • Quarterback: 10
  • Coach: 10
  • Front office: 8
  • Coaching staff: 8
  • Intangibles: 8.5

The Patriots, no surprise, totaled a perfect 30 points in the categories of owner, head coach and quarterback. Bill Belichick was the only head coach to get a 10. Defections through the years in the front office and the coaching staff prevented total perfection and contributed to the fall from the top spot they held in 2009 and 2010.