Bill Belichick confirms Colts and Jets linebackers knew Patriots’ offensive plays
Minutes after the Patriots’ 26-3 win over the Colts last weekend, a game where they gained a season-low 203 total yards, multiple offensive players discussed in the locker room how Indianapolis linebacker Shaquille Leonard seemed to know their play-calls.
Leonard finished with only five tackles, but jumped screens and zone run plays, according to the players. The Patriots finished with a 2.5 yards per carry average and were routinely stuffed on outside zone runs.
During a conference call Tuesday, Pats coach Bill Belichick not only confirmed that Leonard was a step ahead of the offense on a handful of plays, but mentioned Jets linebacker C.J. Mosley called them out a week earlier in a 22-17 Patriots win. Belichick stopped short of saying the offense had definitive tells, though the team’s coaches, like all NFL staffs do, will likely self-scout before heading into the bye week. B.
Below is Belichick’s complete answer about whether Leonard knew the team’s offensive plays before they were run:
“I thought that there were two or three plays for sure that Leonard really got a big jump on and stopped us, basically, on those plays. You know, Mosley got a couple of those plays a couple of weeks ago in the Jets game. It looked like Mosley — it almost looked like he heard the play in the huddle he was on it so fast, and Leonard had a couple like that, too,” he said. “So whether that’s something we were giving away or just something that he anticipated based on whatever the keys were that he might’ve picked up, we certainly want to try to prevent that. But I thought that definitely Leonard for sure did it, and Mosley had a couple plays like that, as well.
“But you know, that’s what good defensive players do. They anticipate things, and they’re able to sometimes get a read on what they think is going to happen. They’re not always right, but sometimes they are, and they can certainly make you look bad offensively. But as an offense, you always wanted to be balanced and try not to give things away to the point where you don’t have something complementary that goes with them. So that’s kind of the game within the game there.
“Obviously if a player or a team is stopping one thing, you have something complementary to go to, then you can offset that. So we’ve certainly had that situation come up as well, too, where we were able to take advantage of whether it was a player thinking he knew what a play was or the defense trying play a certain paly but not defend another play, you’ve got to strike that balance. So that’s, yeah, that’s what it looked like to me, too.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/Mgix1p8
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