FOXBOROUGH — Since his first day since being hired as Patriots head coach, Mike Vrabel said everything was going to be about the players, especially the team's success.
Sometimes those players need a lot of help from their coaches, and that was the case in New England's 16-3 wild-card playoff victory over the Chargers on Sunday night.
One happened during the week. The other happened during the game. But the result was the same — advantage Patriots — and it might be the advantage that winds up propelling them to a Super Bowl appearance in a couple of weeks.
You get to this stage in the playoffs, every team has its share of great players. Sometimes you can get a dead heat there. The teams that keep advancing often have the better coaches (uh, Matt LaFleur, Nick Sirriani). I mean, the Patriots' dynasty was basically built on that. We know Tom Brady was responsible for a lot, but he still needed coaches like Bill Belichick, Charlie Weis, Josh McDaniels, Dante Scarnecchia, Ivan Fears, Scotty O'Brien ... (I could keep going) ... to do their part to put the team over the top, sometimes in the middle of a game.
This was the first playoff game for Vrabel and his Patriots coaching staff. If this were any indication, Patriots 2.0 seems to be in very good hands.
Let's start with the defense. I don't know who was responsible for it. It could be Vrabel, interim defensive coordinator Zak Kuhr, maybe sideline defensive coordinator Terrell Williams was working away on his own for weeks, or one of the assistant coaches. I don't know, and we won't know for a while — maybe this staff's version of Do Your Job, or Four Games to Glory. All I know is the game plan the Patriots coaches came out with against the Chargers had Los Angeles and quarterback Justin Herbert completely befuddled.
“Zak [Kuhr] has been great all year. He keeps the dial spinning. He keeps offenses guessing. All year, he has been doing that," said Robert Spillane. "You know, just after the game, talking to a few of the guys on the other team, they had no clue what we were doing. And they came up and said that: ‘We had no clue what you guys were in all game.’ So for him just to be able to build those packages throughout the week, our back-end players to know how to disguise the different defenses, really keeps quarterbacks guessing.”
I don't know if I've ever heard a quote like that. If I'm Kuhr, I'm putting that in 50-point font at the top of my coaching resume. As a coach, it simply doesn't get better than that. It is the highest of compliments, and absolutely the probable nail in the coffin of the opposing coordinator. In this case, it was Chargers offensive coordinator Greg Roman. Even Jim Harbaugh couldn't give him a vote of confidence after the game when asked if Roman was the right person to be coordinating this offense.
"Right now I don’t have the answers," Harbaugh said. "We’re going to look at that – at everything."
Pity Herbert. No weapons. No offensive line. And absolutely no help from the coaching staff.
We've been talking all season — often in regards to Christian Gonzalez's future value to this team — about how the Patriots had the potential to become a good man-to-man team with corners like Gonzalez, Carlton Davis and Marcus Jones. Vrabel even talked about the potential "cat" coverage — I've got that cat, you've got that cat — when the top-line free agent additions were introduced. Yet the Patriots, even though they increased man rate over the last month, never really saw that out of them.
Until Sunday night.
It started before the very first snap. There were the three corners, standing near Spillane, waiting to see which receivers went where out of the Chargers' huddle. Gonzalez went with Quentin Johnston, Jones with Ladd McConkey, and Davis followed either Tre Harris or Keenan Allen. On third down, Gonzalez often went with Allen, who had by far the most third-down targets on the Chargers (53 to McConkey's 29).
The advanced analytics will tell you the Patriots played almost the exact same man coverage as their season average (about 29%). But that's not true. It might have been "zone", but the Patriots were matching. Tightly. And the Chargers had no clue what to do about it, because the Patriots had not shown that potential all season. It was a master coaching class by the Patriots' defensive coaches, who completely pantsed Roman. He's always, from the 49ers to the Ravens and now the Chargers, has always struggled with the passing game (his run game is pretty good). And it's like the Patriots went into this one and said, "If we show Roman something he wasn't prepared for, he's not going to be able to adjust." Mission accomplished.
"I mean, I’m not going to give you the secret sauce, so I would never do that," said Davis. "But we did have a good feel for what they wanted to do."
You could see it in the way Herbert played. When he understood what the Patriots were in, he was fine. On quick attempts under 2.5 seconds, he