Patriots reportedly used Matt Patricia to design floor plan for football facilities

BOSTON -- Matt Patricia was famously cast in a role for which he was ill-suited last season, switching from defense to offense and being asked to run the entire operation. It went very poorly.

Apparently, though, that wasn't the first time that the Patriots asked Patricia to do something in which he was not particularly experienced.

That's according to NBC Sports Boston's Phil Perry, who did some digging on why and how the Patriots fared so poorly in the NFLPA's player survey of workplace conditions. In the midst of presenting his findings, Perry revealed that after returning to the Patriots as a senior football advisor in 2021, the coach was tasked with ... designing the floor plans of the revamped football facility.

"The [football facility] project has been in the works for some time. Matt Patricia, it's my understanding, played a key role in spearheading how the football ops space would be designed," Perry wrote. "His job within the organization changed drastically going into last season when he went from a do-it-all assistant for Bill Belichick (including helping oversee the layout of new facility space) to the team's de-facto offensive coordinator."

The Patriots have to hope the results in their new facility are better than the results for the team's offense in 2022.

Patricia famously went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, often getting credited as being a rocket scientist. He never quite made it that far, though he earned his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering. That type of brain is likely quite good at spatial reasoning, so perhaps he was successful in helping the Patriots design a facility that will ensure some better player satisfaction grades in future years.

But also ... architects and engineers are people that do exist, and many qualified professionals are available for hire for any and all projects, big and small. Presumably, professionals were hired to handle the important structural details. There are laws and codes for such matters. But the Patriots relying on a football coach to have a hand in the process of what would normally fall on the shoulders of those highly trained professionals is odd. And ... well, that just seems to be the Patriots' M.O. when it comes to utilizing Matt Patricia.