rob ninkovich

Patriots Training Camp Battle Preview: Defensive End

July 3, 2018 by Mike Dussault

The Patriots’ defensive end group suffered heavy departures and attrition in 2017. Chris Long and Jabaal Sheard, key passing-down contibutors for the Super Bowl 52 squad, left via free agency. When Rob Ninkovich retired just a week into training camp it was the biggest blow of all.

Outside his four-game suspension to start 2016 and Ninkovich started every game since mid-way through the 2010 season. You don’t simply replace that kind of reliability, not to mention clutch plays that the “Jet Killer” Ninkovich made on a regular basis.

Third-round pick Derek Rivers tore his ACL in training camp, another critical blow at a ravaged position. Cassius Marsh played 267 defensive snaps, then asked out. It was just too much.

The Patriots were then forced to lean completely on Trey Flowers, while using rookies Dietrich Wise and Adam Butler, Bills practice squadder Eric Lee, and later James Harrison, the strongest edge-setter of them all, as replacements.

2017’s defensive ends were a shell of what they had been since the early 2010’s, before Ninkovich and Chandler Jones started a run of having two strong starters at the top and an array of pass rushers behind them. Though in 2013 and 2014 it was pretty much just Ninkovich and Jones who miraculously played almost every snap and never got hurt.

Will things be better this year? It sure looks like it.

Injury-Riddled Pats Still Crushing Tomato Cans

January 11, 2018 by Mike Dussault

NFL 2017 Season, Top 5, impact on teams by players lost to injury (Lost-av metric, weighting by 2016 quality of injured players)

1 IND
2 NEW
3 NYG
4 ARI
5 WAShttps://t.co/KbGetSeVfH

— Man Games Lost NFL (@ManGamesLostNFL) January 11, 2018

By now you know the Patriots injured reserve list in 2017 is long and distinguished. Here’s a reminder of what it looks like via Patriots.com and it’s not a pretty picture.

According to ManGamesLost.com (subscription required) the Patriots ranked second overall in the league in lost 2016 performance. Add in that the Pats were particularly hit hard by free agency departures on defense, compounded by the retirement of Rob Ninkovich and it’s understated how different the 2017 team is from the one that won the last Super Bowl.

A PatsProp Ninkovich Retrospective

July 31, 2017 by Mike Dussault

Rob Ninkovich came along roughly the same time this blog really kicked into high gear and thus I felt really attached to him and his incredible emergence. As I’ve written many times, what interested me most in the early days of PatsProp was the defensive rebuild that occurred in 2009, the year Nink arrived.

No one embodied the Patriots rebuild more than Nink and when we talk about Belichick rebuilding the defense from scratch to win two more Super Bowls, Ninkovich will be exhibit A of how they did it.

2009 was the year that the Patriots lost Bruschi, Harrrison, Vrabel and Seymour and began laying the groundwork for a defense that would make critical plays to win Super Bowls just a few years down the road. That leadership void needed to be filled and who better to fill it than a free agent long snapper? It’s so Belichick it hurts.

But it wasn’t an easy progression. The 2010 and 2011 Patriots defenses ranked 21st and 30th respectively in Football Outsiders’ DVOA efficiency ratings, the worst and t-3rd worst under Belichick. From those ashes only a couple players survived to become building blocks, none more impressive than Ninkovich.

The comparisons to the previous #50 Mike Vrabel are apt. Ninkovich was a castoff on his last chance who turned that chance into two Super Bowl trophies.

I thought a fun way to look back would be to pull my commentary from the early days of the blog, to track Ninkovich’s progress through the eyes of your faithful blogger. I was always one who believed in Ninkovich, even if I called him Ninkopoop, which was a term of endearment.

Let’s take a look back, and if you’d like to see all the Ninkovich posts from the old blog, including media and lots of quotes from coaching and analysts about him you can CLICK HERE.

Patriots Sunday Practice Report

July 30, 2017 by Mike Dussault

It was a surreal day to say the least. It was my first time as a credentialed member of the media so I got an up close look at practice, but it also just happened to be the day Rob Ninkovich, a longtime favorite of the blog, announced his retirement.

My head was spinning, between meeting some of the Patriots writers I’ve followed and tweeted with for so long to then suddenly sitting in the press conference room surrounded by the team as Ninkovich hung them up, it was an awesome day and one I won’t soon forget.

But ultimately I was there to finally get an up close look at some football and that’s what this was all about. I even bought some binoculars as I learned are a must-have for these kind of practices where the team can often be all the way across the field working behind a wall of players. Hard to see it all, but I still saw plenty.

Let’s start with some officially credentialed observations from practice.

Patriots Positional Preview: Defensive Ends

July 5, 2017 by Mike Dussault

With the 4th of July in the rearview mirror, it will be just a few short weeks until training camp is upon us and Patriots football is back. These are the hardest days of the offseason, the final days, when all the football people are on vacation and there’s a vacuum of information.

Still, we’re so close we can all taste it.

Today we dive into another excerpt from my Season Preview (available here for just $5!), focusing on one of the most interesting positional groups on the roster — the defensive ends. While most of the team returns intact, this group is one that has undergone some significant transition.

Trey Flowers emerged as a breakout star in 2016 but after him there are a lot of question marks. How much does Rob Ninkovich have left in the tank? Can Kony Ealy assimilate? What about rookies Derek Rivers and Deatrich Wise?

With the departure of Jabaal Sheard and Chris Long, some of these new players will be playing significant roles and how they perform could decide whether the defense takes a step forward or back.

Here’s my breakdown of the edge players, whether you want to call them defensive ends or outside linebackers.

A Closer Look at Patriots Defensive Personnel and Roles

February 15, 2017 by Mike Dussault

Each year the Patriots defensive schemes slowly evolve over the course of the year and each year is unique. I always pray that people can get past the simplistic 3-4 vs. 4-3 debate which is archaic and meaningless now.

The Patriots trend of heavily using sub defense continued this season, as did their evolution to incorporating more Cover-2 Zone as the season progressed. The line between defensive ends and outside linebackers continues to blur, while the importance of having three good safeties and three good corners has become more imperative.

Here’s a look at some of the formations the Patriots utilized in the Super Bowl and what they might be able to tell us about their offseason plan of attack.

Patriots Tuesday 10 Pack

December 6, 2016 by Mike Dussault

One of my favorite things in life is ending up in a conversation with another Patriots fan who has no idea that I have been faithfully blogging about the team for nine years. That was the case on Monday when I jumped into a conversation with a couple unknowing people at my real job and listened their deeply held beliefs about this Patriots team.

One of them wasn’t feeling the magic this year, the other thought the offense looked terrible against the Rams and that the only hard game left was Miami. The conversation ended before I could interject any of my own analysis, and really they didn’t seem to care, even though I could at least give them some perspective that they both badly needed.

So my frustration from that conversation has spilled over here into the Tuesday 10 Pack, where I vent about the Monday over-reactors as the dust settles from win number 10.

Here we go…