Bill Belichick made Sam Darnold see ghosts.
While I wouldn’t rule out the Patriots coach summoning spirits to torment a young quarterback, I feel comfortable saying there was no dark magic involved. I would, however, argue that what Belichick conjured up for Darnold on that Monday night was far more evil.
Earlier in the offseason, I covered the foundation of the Patriots defense — its single-high man coverages — but what haunted Darnold that night, and opponents throughout the 2019 season, was New England’s Cover 0 blitzes.
In theory, a 0 blitz is the riskiest call a defensive coordinator can make. It leaves no safety back deep, giving receivers one-on-one matchups across the board. If a player in coverage gets beat or misses a tackle, the offense is scoring. And if the offensive line is able to pick up the pressure and provide the receivers with more time to shake their defenders, a big play is nearly inevitable.
Sending the house is a scary proposition. But, as we covered in Part 1 of this series, defenses have performed better when sending more aggressive blitzes, so maybe the risk isn’t as substantial as one would think. That was certainly true for defenses in 2019. Across 558 snaps of Cover 0, NFL defenses added a total of 42.4 Expected Points, per Sports Info Solutions.
The Patriots have been particularly good when playing Cover 0 over the last two years, leading the NFL in EPA over that time. That success has coincided with a steep increase in usage.
Belichick tormented a lot of quarterbacks with his Cover 0 package in 2019 but Darnold got the worst of it. On eight dropbacks against New England’s zero blitzes, the Jets quarterback threw two interceptions and was sacked once. He was pressured on all but one of those plays.
Is an 87.5% pressure rate good? I think it’s good.
And it wasn’t just any old pressure. The Patriots were getting free runners at the quarterback almost every time they sent a zero blitz. I mean, look at this…
Darnold didn’t stand a chance.
Now, your first instinct might be to blame the offensive line, but like Darnold, those players probably felt like they were seeing ghosts. Or, more accurately, trying to block ghosts. That was by design. The Patriots were using “read” blitzes that make the protection wrong no matter what. The concept behind these read blitzes is essentially the same as the concept behind the zone read: One player can’t be in two places at once.
Here’s how the concept works: The defense puts seven defenders on the line of scrimmage and all of them are potential rushers. But the only players who are locked into rush assignments are the two lined up in the A gaps and the two edge rushers.
The remaining players can either rush or drop back into coverage. That’s dictated by a simple read: Are they being blocked or not? If a blocker turns toward them, they drop back into the short areas a team might attack when trying to quickly beat a blitz; if not, they rush and are typically left with a free path to the quarterback.
The left guard is in a no-win position. He blocks Jamie Collins, leaving nobody to block Devin McCourty. If he blocks McCourty instead, Collins runs free. Now play that same game with every lineman in the photo above and you start to realize that the entire offensive line is in a no-win position.
In Part 2 of this series, we broke down the major families of pass protection: Man protection, half-slide protection and full slide protection. None of them solve the problem the Jets offensive line is facing against this pressure concept.
- In man protection, the weak-side tackle is put in the two-on-one while the right guard and tackle are left blocking no one.
- In a half-slide protection away from the tight end, it’s the other tackle caught in the two-on-one while the left guard is wasted.
- In a half-slide protection to the tight end, it works out like it does in man protection.
- In a full slide protection, it’s the tight end who doesn’t stand a chance and the left guard and right tackle are left blocking nobody.
The Jets weren’t the only team that had trouble blocking these blitzes, either.
Now, all of the examples we’ve looked at thus far have come against empty formations — this was one of New England’s go-to empty checks in 2019 — but the Patriots have an option when teams put another blocker in the backfield. In that case, New England will use a “trailer” technique, which just adds another player onto the rush if the back stays in to protect. Here’s an explanation from a Romeo Crennel playbook:
The Patriots used the trailer technique on Stephon Gilmore’s game-clinching interception at the end of Super Bowl 53. When Todd Gurley stays into block Devin McCourty (32) it allows Duron Harmon (21) to add on to the rush and gives him an unblocked path to the QB.
There really aren’t any schematic answers to these blitzes. The one viable option is for the offensive line to take more vertical sets — pushing off into a more upright position when the ball is snapped — which gives them more time to adjust when the guy they thought they were blocking drops into coverage and they have to adjust to block another rusher. But that creates its own problem: Those more vertical sets leave lineman vulnerable to bullrushes because they aren’t as low to the ground. That’s even more of a problem against the Patriots and their massive defensive linemen. The line might get everyone blocked, but it’s getting pushed back into the quarterback’s lap in the process.
It’s a nasty scheme but not one that any team can run. The Patriots just so happen to have the NFL’s deepest and most talented stable of cornerbacks. Belichick should have more confidence in his guy to hold up in one-on-one coverage than the average coach.
But what if you could put similar stress on a protection without leaving your cornerbacks on an island? In Part 4, we’ll look at how some NFL defenses got the best of both worlds during the 2019 season.