Patriots' defense last night
 

Romo touched on this, but they had an interesting approach that looked like it gave Mahomes a bit of trouble at times.

They only had 3 DL, and their 2 DE's rushed up the field and held the sides of the pocket, creating a "box" around Mahomes to prevent him from rolling/escaping/doing his magic tricks. They then kept everyone else in coverage in his line of sight to limit his windows and throwing lanes.

The plus was he had lots of time in the pocket, the minus was he had no where to go to help his WR's get open via scrambling, reducing his throwing lanes/windows.

Thankfully our WR corps is very fast and can get open, but again, with reduced windows, it made it harder on Mahomes.

I would not be surprised if we saw this set up again this season a few times.

They are also a very disciplined squad that wasn't falling for a lot of the trickery crap we tried to run.

At the end of the day when Patrick had to attack downfield we were successful. There's a lesson for him and Andy both there.

Good thing Reid is an offensive genius. He's probably in his office drawing up plays to beat that defense as we speak.

And its a good thing Mahomes has a photographic memory, so he'll know how to adjust next time.

I don't think that Mahomes can be stopped. I'm sure he can solve that defensive look but no reason to bust out the answer during a regular season game against a team we will likely see in the playoffs

The biggest concern I had was that they were only rushing 3 but Mahomie was running for his life quite often. That's no bueno

Have to get Mahomes under center and beat them with the running game when they do that.

Not surprisingly, it is a variation of what has been somewhat successful in the past (all relative considering Mahomes has never had a sub-par day). You rush no more than 4 and put everyone else into coverage. Blitzing him allows for someone to be open and he can find them.

Would help if the OL could open some holes for the RB inside from time to time


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As soon as you do that, Belichick will throw something else at them.

Gotta be able to run the ball better in those spots.

That’s where the offense failed. Any team can make it hard to find open WRs if they’re willing to abandon stopping the run. By and large, the Patriots did that.

And we weren’t able to punish them for it with the ground game. Get 5-6 yards on 1st down to keep them honest and that will stop. We weren’t doing that.

There wasn’t a good reason for it so we kept going back to the well expecting it to stop but it never did. They kept using 4 guys to kill our running game. Just cannot have that.

If they see a flaw in their run blocking and execution, they’ll get it fixed and that’ll be that. There’s no reason to have struggled that badly on the ground against a team that was barely trying to contain our running game.

That's 2 effective approaches against us, though.

1 - Have a pair of superstars at DE and keep 7 in coverage, and hope that your DE's aren't gassed by the 4th quarter.

2 - Build a box to contain Mahomes and reduce his throwing lanes.


For 1 - Very few rosters can support that approach. It has to be sheer numbers. If I'm the Chargers/Raiders/Broncos, I'm going all out to get 3-4 Edge stars and penetrating DT.

Bellichek is a damn genius. With better QB play , they could have won the game last night.

Agreed - we need a stronger RB2.

was better than the Ravens.

They didn't respect our running game one bit, and we proved them right. Our between the tackles running has by and large been abysmal this season. Need to get that fixed.