9 Things To Consider Against The Pats
By Cory Mageors | @inthemageors
I'm not scared of the Patriots.
I'm disappointed that this team isn't going to be at full strength. In a perfect scenario, if the Cowboys had Romo and Dez I had them at 4-0 coming into this game.
And as far as a true test of what this team was to be made of, the Patriots were going to be just that. Jason Garrett would have gotten his team on pace for what the true tempo of planning for an elite team was like, and we would have a real idea of how this team matched up with the best in the NFL.
However, the fans lose big time on what was going to be one of the best pairings of the NFL season.
I present to you 9 things to consider against the Patriots:
1. Injuries are not an excuse is great coach speak. You want your players to believe that and you want them to feel like the next man up is capable of competing. Problem is, and I said this against the Falcons and I believed it against the Saints as well, "Why do we think our second string is better than their first team?"
With the salary cap, its extremely difficult to have the same level of talent t every position let alone the same level at the backup positions. What you hope is you can coach the guys quick enough and cover up for deficiencies enough to get through the game. With the amount of injuries the Cowboys have had, it's been a sinking ship and instead of being able to coach, Marinelli Linehan and Garrett have been trying to get water out of the boat. In this case against the best team in the NFL with all of their talent on hand, injuries are the exact excuse.
2. On a positive note, there are some returning players. I will get into Sean Lee's concussion in just a moment, but with the return of Rolando McClain and Greg Hardy I'm hoping we see a far more physical team than we've seen the last couple of games.
The Falcons kind of pushed the Cowboys around all they wanted. Every player credited McClain for being the reason they were tough and physical last year. We've watched Greg Hardy and we know he has a mouth full of words, but will he back it up. I believe so. I'm not expecting them to be saviors and I would have liked to have seen them inject energy into an already winning team, but for now I just want to see them integrate back into the defense and work their way to leading the group.
3. Gronk is going to chew us up if they don't drape themselves all over him like a table cloth. Remember the play I kept telling you about with Julio Jones lined up in the slot.
Jones slips in behind the linebacker in front of the corner and scoots up field on 1-high safety coverage for big gains. They ran it multiple times against the Cowboys. The Saints did it with Ben Watson. The Patriots run it too.
Here you can see since he's technically a tight end, Jacksonville kept a linebacker on dropped in zone and Gronk grabs this for an easy first down. On the very next play.
The Jags left a linebacker on him again and he runs almost the same route but gets deeper into the zone and busts loose for 43-yards down to the Jacksonville 8.
Patrolling the middle of the field with Gronk is going to be huge, but he can also line up wide. In talking with Bryan Broaddus, he says Byron Jones will see a lot of Gronk as Jones has the athleticism and physicality to play with Gronk. But this is a matchup nightmare.
4. The other matchup nightmare. Julian Edelman. The dude can go either way and I wish I could post gifs (which I'm gonna have to learn how to do) because these screengrabs don't do justice to what he does before he breaks into his route, he runs like 4-5 moves before he goes anywhere and now the CB is like a soccer goalie on a PK trying to guess a direction to dive.
Here he fakes left, right, left again and dips right in between all three defenders for a quick 7 yards.
Here he decides drives up field fakes left and breaks hard right for 8 yards creating a great open window for Brady.
And here he goes hard left with no move, and dips in behind the wide receiver running a medium slant.
Tyler Patmon and Corey White are in charge of covering him and they will have their hands full. I think they can run with him, but they better be physical at the line of scrimmage to knock him out of any route instead of playing off and letting Brady pick them apart underneath. Because he'll pick all the way to the red zone and then hit his big target Gronk whenever he wants.
4. I'm gonna step away from the Patriots for a minute and talk Sean Lee. I asked this on the show the other night. Do you think Lee should be playing football? Frank Provenzano said the great Bob Gainey said "the problem with injury prone players is they tend to get injured." Spot on. Lee is inuury prone and you spend all week game planning with him in mind as the guy who will take care of this and that. Then you get into the game and he's hurt and now your game plan is out the window. I know this dude has super man ability when he's healthy and on the field, but you never know how long he'll be there and you don't know if you can count on him to make it through the game. For his own health and own personal well being I hope he's thought about his life after football, and I know he doesn't want to give up now because when you still CAN, you still WANT TO.
5. If the Cowboys don't win this game or stay competitive, it could be a crushing blow to a group of guys who are hanging by a thread of hope. After the Saints loss they were mentally shook. Tyrone Crawford admitted that to Mike Fisher. Going into a bye week with the hope of getting Dez back is good, but I'm very concerned about the confidence and magic this team had coming into the season.
6. All the talk about Joseph Randle and Darren McFadden and Christine Michael…the Cowboys still have to figure out how to run the ball. One of the keys to this game is limiting possessions for the Patriots. If you give them enough possessions they will try to score 52 on you, if you keep them off the field, keep the game close and force them to make a play late, you may just have enough legs with the return of Hardy and McClain at the end of the game to force them into a mistake. Garrett says nothing has changed with Randle as the starter and I hope the near fumble thing was the wake up call for Randle. But in order for the Cowboys to keep this thing close, they have to run the ball with all sorts of confidence and consistency.
7. If you told me Brandon Weeden was going to play like this before the season, I would have been shocked by what you were saying. Again I thought in week 3 the Cowboys were trying to get his mental and physical stopwatch in tune to the speed of the game. Drop Back, Progression 1, 2, 3, check down. Then against the Saints he looked more comfortable delivering. And on that Touchdown pass at the end of the game I hear a lot of people saying it was a better catch by Terrance Williams than it was a throw by Weeden. I'm just gonna say it was a great play by both. Weeden had only one place to put that ball.
And Williams had only one way to catch it. They both executed on the play to keep the team in the game.
8. If you haven't decided where watch football Sunday yet, watch it at Dave and Busters in Frisco with me and my co-host Kevin Hageland. It's a freaking blast of a place with sweet drink specials $5 appetizers AND Kevin gets shot in the face with a T-Shirt Gun every week!
Haha! That kids face in the orange shorts! Too fun!
9. I really hate New England. They are walking around telling the world to suck it and nobody can do a thing about it. They've been involved in cheating scandal's throughout the entirety of Bill Belichik's reign and the NFL has positioned themselves to be inept to stop them. Their fan base is just as arrogant as their team is and the only way to shut them up is to stick them in the mouth. I feel defeated already as a fan looking at the position of playing them without my best players, but when Sunday comes there is no hiding. I hope this team has enough resiliency to fight them to the end and leave us wanting more after the bye week.
Cory Mageors is the co-host of The K&C Masterpiece on 105.3 The Fan. Follow him @inthemageors and follow the show @kandc1053