Patriots' defense last night

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Dante84

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.

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.