Bill Polian:
Magnificent coaching job by Belicheck and staff....giving Belicheck two weeks to prepare for an opponent is not fair to the opponent....he's gonna make life
miserable for you every way possible...he did that in spades to the Rams.
Their primary focus was to stop the run...they didn't care much what the Rams did in the passing game if they got the run stopped. When you play Belicheck you have to ask yourself what is he going to take away from us? He took away the run with big people on the field....they have 2 separate front line defensive
platoons...a run stopping group that is big, heavy and powerful...when it got into long yardage situations, they brought in the pass rush group and they did a
remarkable job.
No Ram runner, with few exceptions, had a clean hole to run in. Gurley had no place to go....had 2 good runs, and one was called back by a phantom holding call.
The Pats started out stopping the run and ended stopping the run.....with 30 minutes to adjust, the Rams never did....which was amazing to me.
The Pats big people beat the living daylights out of the Rams O-Line....they overpowered them, knocked them back, beat them one on one in pass rush
which should never happen. The Pats line is not necessarily aiming for sacks...what they want to do is push the blocker into the QB...make the QB go
off his spot, make him throw short legged....and that's what they did. I estimated the Pats line was winning at the snap of the ball about 70% of the time, which is amazing.
In the secondary they played man to man with Gilmore and on the other side they played sophisticated zones where they dropped people who you don't think were going to drop, where they knock people off their routes at the LOS with a D-lineman, and then back them up with a LB.
On the interception, Cooks should have recognized the zero blitz and broken off the route....but he didn't.. and Goff's timing was disrupted by the blitz and he threw the ball up.
The Pats did something the Rams should have been prepared for: The rushed 5 a lot of a time....meaning one LB was usually coming...they were using pick stunts...which they showed it in detail against the Vikings....the Rams should have been prepared for that...which they may have been and it might have just been an execution issue.
I said if the Rams were to win they had to win the battle on the line of scrimmage....and the Rams O-line got decimated in both run and pass
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That was the first segment....I'll have more tomorrow.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/2019 09:45PM by RamBill.
