FOXBORO – Josh McDaniels knows that, in the NFL, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…” doesn’t apply.
Evolve or die. Even if you’re ripping it up through three games.
“As you go through the course of the season, you know adjustments will happen (from upcoming opponents),” the Patriots offensive coordinator saidon Monday. “They’re gonna make adjustments based on what they’ve seen us do so we can’t sit there and say, ‘Oh, the same things are gonna work every single week.’ That’s not the National Football League. They’re too good in every other building. They’re preparing for us. They’ll know the things we’ve had success with and they’re gonna try and stop them. We have to be able to adjust on the fly or adjust during the week and have it ready ahead of time.”
The timing of the Patriots’ bye week means this is when the team will roll up its sleeves and start either ripping out things that haven’t worked or tweaking them so they are more difficult to deal with.
It’s called self-scouting. A lot of it is projection. Opposing teams have seen formations, personnel and signals used against certain defensive looks when in certain down and distance situations. Those defenses have intel they wouldn’t have had at the start of the month. How will those teams now adjust? What things do the Patriots want to do differently when faced with the same situation?
I look at last February’s Super Bowl pick by Malcolm Butler and still wonder why, if Seattle knew that their rub-slant was on tape and scouted, did they not have a less risky wrinkle they could have run? Like asking Ricardo Lockette to take a jab-step to the inside and then run a fade to the corner which would have encountered less traffic and had Butler out of position by about 20 feet.
A team can’t just do the same things and think they’ll work the same in Week 13 as they did in Week 3.
“There are a lot of challenges to come,” McDaniels warned. “It’s 16 weeks, we’ll have adversities to handle whether it’s injuries, opponents, matchups. There’s a lot of things you’ve gotta go through and hopefully the identity of your group – offense, defense and the team – is formed by November, December. By then you know, ‘This is our group, this is how we play, we gotta try to have success this way.’ It’s all a building process right now. We’re still trying to figure things out and improve.”
And the Patriots aren’t really even close to determining which offensive personality is most effective.
“We played an awful lot of players (Sunday) and that’s a good thing and that’s a healthy thing to have,” he explained. “When that changes, I don’t know. As long as they’re playing well, they’ll have an opportunity to play. We know there’s gonna be tough situations coming down the pike.”