New England Patriots: Young players stepping up big time

New England Patriots fans should be encouraged by their team’s performance vs. the Chiefs.

Leading the league with eight COVID-19 opt-outs, New England has been managing to perform up to par with a young, speedy defense. Two of the leading names on this list include box-safety Patrick Chung and star linebacker Dont’a Hightower.

In the wake of these absences specifically, rookie Kyle Dugger and promising riser Ja’Whaun Bentley have ascended to starting roles and displayed an excellent mix of athleticism and motor, despite some inexperience-driven flaws.

The lack of linebackers in New England this season was the reason head coach Bill Belichick was encouraged to attempt a radical defensive concept that put a pause on the Kansas City attack throughout the first half (including a pick-six generated by pressure from Chase Winovich which would be whistled dead and disregarded by officials).

New England runs out of a 3-4 base on defense, with emphasis on the outside linebackers being able to function in each phase of the defense.

Currently, these roles are held by Chase Winovich and John Simon, two edge defenders who embody much of what Belichick searches for in the role.

After that and Bentley, the New England group is thin. Rookies Anfernee Jennings & Josh Uche (IR) have been unable to find playing time as of yet, and neither Brandon Copeland nor Shilique Calhoun have been able to make a breakthrough.

With only Bentley inhabiting the second level of the defense, Belichick needed to find an alternative approach to inside linebackers of old. At the tail end of the 2019 season, Belichick deployed Terrence Brooks on more than one occasion into the heart of the defense as a box-safety, but the personnel on the field indicated Brooks was operating as a true inside linebacker.

This was done with other members of the deep Patriots secondary, and in 2020 safety Adrian Phillips has found more success with the role.

Strong safeties have been moved down to the inside linebacker position more and more in recent years as the game has gotten faster, with players such as Mark Barron and Deone Bucannon being the most well-known to make the jump. This addition of speed negates many of the mismatches created by the modern offensive weaponry entering the NFL. Over recent seasons, teams have found the safety position to be the most versatile of defensive positions (Jamal Adams, Tyrann Mathieu, etc).

New England’s defensive philosophy in coverage has fully committed itself to an old-school, one-on-one ball that trusts their athletic, rangy corners to be able to keep up with receivers throughout the game. League-best lockdown corner Stephon Gilmore leads the unit against number one wideouts week to week, whilst undrafted studs Jonathan Jones and J.C. Jackson bring burner speed for any game-breaker wideouts.

With this trustworthy defense needing to complete a stellar performance against the best offense in football to have any chance to win, Belichick decided to employ the most radical of defensive personnel decisions committing to rivaling the Chiefs speed…and it worked. Instead of opting for the conventional multi-linebacker sets that are torn apart week after week by Mahomes & company, the middle of the defense was instead filled with even more rangy safeties.

Even though New England has kept with their man-to-man defense throughout the past two seasons, Belichick challenged Mahomes to win the game on his own with eight-man zone coverage using safeties Adrian Phillips, JoeJuan Williams, and Kyle Dugger on the second level in the role of linebackers. These three ran 4.63, 4.55, and 4.49 40’s respectively, presenting a defensively-favored mismatch for which the Chiefs do not have a power-run counter.

Belichick was aware that matching a young secondary in straight-man coverage against this kind of speed and talent would be hopeless throughout the course of a sixty-minute game. That is why even though Mahomes and his receivers have the knowledge and experience to pick apart a zone defense, Belichick trusted his safeties to beat the ball to the spot and disrupt Kansas City’s undersized receivers.

The NFL has been searching for a single direct answer to the problem that is the Kansas City Chiefs, and New England may have managed to expose the chink in their armor with a hyper-radical defense. This was only possible thanks to Belichick’s annual expenditure of extensive draft capital in collegiate corners and safeties who possess unique physical skillsets.

One draft-trend to watch if this concept begins to catch on would be the rise of athletically-promising secondary players from small universities (ex: Kyle Dugger, Lenoir-Rhyne). Every team is searching for their own Jamal Adams to anchor a secondary with their three-level playmaking ability when they can help beat the explosive offenses running rampant across the league.