Patriots' Return To Fundamental Football Keys Punking Of Falcons

"To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that success can only come to the play that hits the line hard." - Teddy Roosevelt

Running the football is one of the most fundamental of all tenets of the sport. Along with blocking and tackling, Walter Camp devised rules to separate the fledgling American sport of football from the international sport of rugby. Since that period in the latter half of the 19th century, Roosevelt stepped in to institute measures to make the game safer to play, paving the way for innovators like Glenn "Pop" Warner to introduce many of the novelties that football fans today take for granted as part of the appeal of the modern game.

Dion Lewis finds lots of running room vs Falcons

In between, rules have been added that make the game safer and that make the game more fan friendly - more exciting to the casual viewer, hence the popularity of the sport on many levels, from Pop Warner leagues to high school and college conferences to the professional game - but the fundamentals of running the football, blocking and tackling have endured the test of time...

...and it is the teams that implement all components of the modern game with the tenets of the genesis of the sport that are ultimately the most successful.

On a cool, mid-October Sunday evening in Massachusetts on a football field enveloped in a dense fog right out of a dream, the New England Patriots defeated an Atlanta Falcons team by honoring the roots of their game. A display of fundamental football missing all too often in favor of the allure that the exciting vertical passing game provides.

But for football purists, Sunday night's game before a packed house at Gillette Stadium and a national television audience of millions more, the Patriots' dominating 23-7 victory was simply a matter of the team with the best collection of talent in the game using that talent in the way that the fundamentals tell us they should be used.

Against a team like the Falcons who have successfully victimized many-a-defense with their vertical passing game to score quickly and frequently at a torrid pace, the cure is to limit the number of opportunities they have to do so, and to dictate how and when they are able to, working in tandem with the offense to play a complementary style of ball.

Executing an offensive game plan that called for a rotation of their excellent kennel of young runners, the Patriots methodically moved the ball on offense by finding a balance between the running and passing games, the backs running for 157 yards on 31 carries and quarterback Tom Brady throwing 29 times and completing 21 of those attempts for 249 yards and two scores...

...as a result winning the time of possession battle by a wide margin and limiting the opportunities that the Falcons had to operate on offense to just seven possessions for the entire game, including an absurd three possessions in the second half.

New England scored touchdowns on drives of 74 and 53 yards - each taking seven plays to accomplish - but the real damage done to the Falcons' defense came on drives that resulted in just field goals being scored, where taking time off the clock was paramount to points.

The Patriots took a 10-0 lead midway through the second quarter on a drive that went 64 yards in 14 plays and ate up 6:37, then after a James White scoring reception brought the Falcons' defenders to their knees just before halftime, Brady stepped on their throats by leading drives of 71 and 74 yards on their first two possessions of the second half, chewing up 6:23 and 5:17 respectively...

...bringing the score to 23-0 by the time that Atlanta finally got a fourth quarter possession, at which time the New England defense had retreated into a three-deep shell and forced the Falcons to kill over five minutes of clock before scoring a meaningless touchdown with just four minutes remaining in the game.

The fundamental approach is a good look for a Patriots' team that has been struggling to find an identity.

New England's offense is stacked with playmakers who do what they do on different levels, but have had to perhaps scale back their own expectations for the good of the team. For example, receiver Brandin Cooks has Olympic-class sprinter speed, but on a team that has been a move-the-chains, chew-the-clock entity for going on two decades, the vertical element he brings to the offense has helped the team as a threat more than a realization.

Yet, despite playing in a more conservative offense than he was used to in New Orleans before migrating north at the behest of Bill Belichick, he is on pace to destroy nearly every one of his career marks, including receiving yards, yards per reception and yards per game - and all of this while being on pace for a career low in targets and receptions.

In fact, Cooks has become just one of the guys, his 28 receptions tied for third on the team with Chris Hogan, which is just one behind the duo of Danny Amendola and tight end Rob Gronkowski and a full ten behind running back James White.

That's called balance, and it's something that also filtered into the running game on Sunday night, as the Patriots used four backs, with Dion Lewis assuming lead back duties and rushing for 76 yards on 13 carries (5.84ypc), White continuing his vital passing back role and handling the ball nine times for 47 combined yards, and easing previously injured Rex Burkhead back into the mix (seven combined touches for 41 yards)...

...saving power back Mike Gillislee for the four-minute offense in which he picked up 31 yards on eight tough carries. Brady taking a knee cut their combined average down, but if you factor in only what the backs accomplished on the ground, they ran for over five yards a pop in what was by far their largest contributions of the season.

The defense has been seeking something to hang their hats on as well, and have discovered in the past three games that with all of the role players that they employ, sticking to the most elementary disciplines of staying in their rush lanes and and using their excellent stable of safeties as buffers against big plays has enabled their linebackers to flow more freely to the ball and their pass rushers move the opposing quarterback off their mark.

Though they still are mired at the bottom of the league in yards surrendered, they have managed to climb out of the abyss as far as scoring defense, having given up only 38 points in that three-week span, an average of 12.7 points per game.

It's not like they've done anything differently other than having an intense focus on fundamentals and employing the three-safety element into their nickel and dime packages as their base defense, rushing just three and keeping two linebackers on the second level, enabling them to work a heavier concentration of their safety corps into supporting roles all over the formation.

Known as a "Giant Dime", the Patriots used free safety Devin McCourty and Big Nickel centerfielder Duron Harmon as twin deep safeties in support of a cornerback corps that featured Malcolm Butler in his usual chess piece role, and also second-year nickleback Jonathan Jones and recent addition Johnson Bademosi, a sixth-year, career special teamer - and all former undrafted free agents....

...while dropping strong safety Patrick Chung into the box, forming a 2-2-2 (heretofore known as the "triple-double") stack that forces quarterbacks to the perimeter and optimizes support for the run defense.

The result was pretty much just how Belichick and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia drew it up, the Falcons' vertical passing game nullified by the physicality of the New England coverage - eight targets of more than 15 yards downfield with only two connections totaling 35 yards - while keeping Atlanta's vaunted running game in the background by consistently forcing the Falcons into long-yardage situations.

The only real bitch-kitty for the Patriots' defense was keeping Falcons' quarterback Matt Ryan in the pocket consistently, as he escaped three times for 37 yards and three first downs to extend drives and made their rushing average look a lot better than it actually was.

New England took a 17-0 lead into the room at halftime on the strength of a Cooks 11-yard jet sweep / shuffle pass touchdown, a 29-yard Stephen Gostkowski field goal and White's two yard slant, then built the lead to 23-0 on two more Gostkowski field goals after the thick blanket of fog settled in over the field, then settled in for a little clock killing to close out the game.

Cooks' touchdown was set up by a heavy dose of Lewis gashing the Atlanta defense right up the middle and a roughing the passer penalty on Atlanta that nullified a bad Brady interception in the end zone - the speedster crossing the shallow formation and taking the short flip from Brady, turning on the jets to gain the corner and following the blocking of Gronkowski into paydirt.

Belichick admitted in his Monday morning conference call with reporters that the exchange between Brady and Cooks on the play ad-libbed on the fly to take advantage of Cooks' speed. "I mean, it could have been a handoff," Belichick said, "we felt like that was the best way to run that play. We just ended up doing it that way."

Gronkowski said he heard Cooks coming up on him, felt him tug in his jersey at about the two-yard line. "He was kind of hiding behind me, and he was like 'Go, Rob, go!' I had the little block and he made it into the end zone."

White's touchdown just before the half wasn't as colorful or flashy, but good for six nevertheless - and was set up by a poor decision by the Falcon's offensive coordinator who called for a pass play on 4th and six from the Patriots' 47 yard line against the triple-double stack, which Ryan airmailed out of bounds.

Three White runs up the gut and the same number of opportunistic pass plays later and White was celebrating in the end zone and Patriots' fans were celebrating the best half of football they've seen from their team all season.

"Bill said it best this week" McCourty said after the game. "He said it was about time that we played complementary football for four quarters. He said at times, we play really well on offense and at other times we play really well on defense. At times, we play really well on special teams, but we haven't gotten it all together. I think tonight we did a good job of that."

McCourty won't hear any contrasting opinions on that.