Greg Cosell’s Look Ahead: What will Patriots do against Andrew Luck?
One challenge I have looking ahead to the weekend’s games is when New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick comes up.
Because trying to predict what Belichick will do each week is nearly impossible.
Belichick changes things up constantly. He rarely is predictable. Like in the Denver Broncos game, if you’d have said the Patriots would use safety Patrick Chung on Broncos tight end Julius Thomas, you’d have said, ‘That’s not a good matchup.” But it worked out great. Belichick does things and you say, “Wow, really?” There’s no way to know what he’ll do.
And it’s an even bigger challenge for the Indianapolis Colts to figure out this week, as they prepare to face the Patriots on Sunday night. But we do know that Belichick has given Andrew Luck some problems in two previous meetings. Luck has thrown seven interceptions in two games against New England. The Patriots have won both games.
We can take a look back at last season’s divisional round playoff game for clues. It was evident early the Patriots’ approach was based more on coverage than pressure. They didn’t blitz much. They played a lot of man coverage, and specifically “man free lurk” with a lurking defender in the middle. The Patriots have run a lot of man coverage since Brandon Browner came back, so maybe they’ll have a similar approach this game.
The Patriots are masterful at disguising coverage, and they did so against Luck last season. The Patriots are able to confuse anyone – they did so on a Peyton Manning interception to Rob Ninkovich a couple weeks ago – and they could do the same to Luck on Sunday night. They’ll try to create problems for Luck.
One wild card matchup is T.Y. Hilton. He’s a fast, agile receiver so he’s a bad matchup for Browner. In that playoff game last season the Patriots moved Aqib Talib around to match up with Hilton. Will Darrelle Revis do that Sunday? Maybe, although Revis doesn’t generally travel on each play.
On the Colts side, one thing that I wonder about when I watch film of them is if they pass too much. They didn’t try to run the ball at all against the New York Giants two weeks ago. The running game was irrelevant. That means that Luck gets hit a lot, and makes throws under duress (which sometimes causes him to be a bit inaccurate). He makes a lot of those throws, but it becomes harder. The Colts’ offensive line isn’t good enough to sustain that style of play. So Luck takes a lot of hits. You want to be careful with that.
It should be a great game between the Colts and Patriots. It’ll also be interesting to see how Belichick approaches defending Luck, because he’s usually impossible to predict.
Stanton’s time
The Cardinals will be without Carson Palmer the rest of the season, and he gets a bad rap. He throws it well and was having a good season. But now he’s done for the year with an ACL injury, and Drew Stanton takes over as their starter beginning Sunday against a really good Detroit Lions defense.
We’ve seen Stanton play some this season, and he has played well. He knew where to go with the ball. He didn’t make mental mistakes. One concern is that he can be erratic with ball placement, and this offense demands precise ball placement. Cardinals coach Bruce Arians is not going to scale it back. The obvious example of this was the 48-yard go-ahead touchdown by John Brown.
That was a shot play not long after Stanton entered, a post-corner combination to the field side with Brown to the post and Larry Fitzgerald running the corner route from the slot. It was play action with seven-man protection to let the routes develop. Stanton was forced to step up quickly in the pocket, then made a gutsy throw that had to beat single-high Rams safety Rodney McLeod. It was a great play.
The more Stanton plays, the more teams will game plan for him, and is he going to make those throws with consistency? I’m curious to see what his accuracy will be like going forward, and how good his decision-making will be. There are a lot of decisions to be made in this offense.
Sanchez shines
There are two parts to Mark Sanchez’s performance this past Monday night, as he prepares to go into Green Bay to face the Packers on Sunday.
First, Sanchez looked sharp. He has much quicker feet with more quick twitch and a faster delivery than Nick Foles, physical traits that better fit Chip Kelly’s offense. He showed excellent pocket movement right from the start. He has light athletic feet and comfortable movement. He was not frenetic at all. One thing the Eagles get with Sanchez is more a more effective bootleg play-action game, and Kelly utilized it.
The other part of it is that, by NFL standards, it was a pretty easy game for Sanchez. The Panthers have almost no pass rush and one of the worst secondaries in the NFL from a talent standpoint. That’s a bad combination, of course. I believe Sanchez was hit only once against the Panthers.
He’ll have a harder time against the Packers on Sunday. But Sanchez does bring a different look to the Eagles offense.
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NFL analyst and NFL Films senior producer Greg Cosell watches as much NFL game film as anyone. Throughout the season, Cosell will join Shutdown Corner to share his observations on the teams, schemes and personnel from around the league.
