PatsPropaganda

I think they’re definitely a hard team to prepare for. He does a good job. He doesn’t have a million plays, he’s got a lot of very aggressive concepts and he does them a lot differently with a lot of different personnel groups, different formations so it doesn’t look the same but it’s the same concept, same type of attack but it shows in a lot of different ways. You have a lot of different things to defend. He runs the ball inside, he runs it outside a lot, they attack the width of the field and they certainly attack the depth of the field. They run vertical routes, they run deep seam routes, they run check-downs and screens and those types of patterns too. You have to defend from sideline to sideline; you have to defend from the line of scrimmage really to pretty much the back end line. That’s a lot of space defensively to account for but that’s basically their attack. They can throw one over your head or they can throw a check down to [Darren] Sproles and he can run for 30 yards or a screen to [Pierre] Thomas and he can run for 30 yards. It’s not all posts and bombs, it’s everything. They do a good job of spacing the field, [Drew] Brees does a good job of getting it to those playmakers and those guys do a good job of making plays. You have to defend everything. That’s hard. You have to defend each guy and each part of the field and it’s a lot to defend.

Gruden’s game plan was simple: Minimize Dalton’s impact, and give him as many high-percentage throws as possible. The Bengals called five straight runs to open the game, and overall called 37 runs to 33 passes, rushing for 162 yards.  Dalton had the early hiccup with the red zone interception to Brandon Spikes, but overall he completed 20 of 27 passes for 212 yards and made no other big mistakes. Of his 33 dropbacks, 15 were plays with quick, designed reads — short slants and swings and plays on which Dalton just had to get the ball out quickly. He also checked down four times, smartly taking positive yards instead of trying for something big and risky.