Belichick was also asked whether he read the comments of Houston defensive lineman
Antonio Smith, who was
very suspicious of the adjustments the Patriots made to Houston’s defense after trailing at halftime Sunday, 17-7.
“Yeah, I saw them. I don’t have any comment on them. I think that’s a league matter,” Belichick said.
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Q: In the second half, you used a lot more ‘regular personnel’ with the fullback, running back, tight end and two receivers. What prompted that move, as it was more frequent that we were accustomed to and what did it allow you to do?
BB: As the game went on, we were able to see how Houston was going to match up to our different personnel groups and we had several groups that we used yesterday. I think Josh [McDaniels] did a good job of mixing the groups. Let’s say defensively when you’re facing a team that uses a lot of personnel groups, it’s hard to have a lot of things ready for a lot of different groups. It’s just hard to have a game plan where you have eight or nine different calls against seven, eight groups. You just run out of time to practice it and time to work on it. So, I think
Josh was able to get a good handle on how they were matching our different personnel groups and what they were trying to do against them. When you get it down to two or three things and Tom [Brady] can recognize by formations what the defenses are, that can get you into a good play or give you a quick indication of where to go with the ball, so we didn’t have to hold it, we could get it out there quick and find the receivers that had the best matchups. Again, kind of a combination of all those factors. The different personnel groups I think ended up being helpful for us in terms of getting good plays, or plays that we felt comfortable with, matched up against what the Texans were doing.
Q: How difficult is it for a defense to deal with the different skill sets of your running backs and not knowing who will be the feature back from game to game?
BB: I think we’ve seen that from different teams over the past few years. It’s kind of interesting how, again, and Houston is a good example but we saw with Denver, we saw with other teams that try to match you on defense,
sometimes it takes a little while to figure out how they’re going to match you. It’s a lot easier when you go to three receivers, one tight end and a back to get that matchup. It’s the ones in-between where there are two tight ends and who is the back and we’ve found in years past and even this year, sometimes a team would match a sub defense against a certain player. It could be a back, it could be [Danny] Woodhead or [Kevin] Faulk or [Shane] Vereen. It didn’t matter who else was in the game. Sometimes they would match it based on what combination of tight ends were in there. When you’re shuffling a lot of people in and out, it’s hard to, I think, defensively it’s hard to get it all figured out. Sometimes that why I’m saying it’s just predicated on one guy. Like going back, there were times when teams, as soon as they saw Kevin Faulk come in the game, they would go sub just in anticipation of whoever the other people were, it was more of a passing-type of down. Then hopefully when you see that, you would try to put him in there with a group that you feel like could give you a good running matchup against a team. We hit a couple sub runs on Houston yesterday in that situation. Again, that’s a little bit of a chess game sometimes. If a team is trying to match you, what’s triggering the match? Is it a certain guy? Is it multiple receivers? Will they match multiple tight ends if a certain tight end is the trigger guy? Is it a guy? Sometimes it’s just down and distance. Sometimes you’ll see a team that will just send their sub group on there if it’s second-and-8, it doesn’t matter who you have in the game. Sometimes figuring that out, when you use different personnel groups offensively, takes a little bit. Shane’s a guy that dependent on how a team feels about their coverage situation, he may or may not dictate a matchup. It’s something that we’re aware of, but we don’t know how everybody is going to treat us until we actually get in the game and play them.
