I feel like we are almost better without Fournette on the field on 1st down. Our offense is creative and unpredictable when Fournette isn't in the game. When he is in the game our offense stagnates because even Bill Belichick's college roomate's dead great aunt Becky knows we will run up the middle. I feel like if we announce our first down plays to the defense, we would offer more confusion than actually pretending like we are going to do anything else. It's been this way all season. We give Leonard low percentage runs and follow them by giving Blake low percentage passes and then act surprised when the offense moves the ball at a low percentage.

Opening it up doesn't necessarily mean to start lobbing the ball all over, but we can't keep playing into the same predictable patterns. Against the Steelers we ran like 15+ lead plays up the middle? It's no wonder Pitt bit on that playaction to Tommy Bo so badly. Every team in the league would have if you run the same play exclusively all game long. All they had to do was continue to use what was working from the 1st half and maybe tweak a few things depending on how the Pats adjusted. Instead we completely blew up our offensive and defensive gameplan in the 2nd half that astonishingly had the appearance of desperation despite having a two score lead.

On defense, my belief is that Wash got scared we were going to give up a big play if we continued to play man. We had Smith and Church on Cooks and Dorsett in man more than just a few times, which should have never happened, and narrowly averted disaster several times. It's Wash's fault for an inability to disguise the defense to which Brady exploited to create matchups. Then he doubled down on scared and went to zone because of his own inability to prevent those horrible matchups. Soo... Tom Brady got to see a team change to an unscripted defense on the fly and its a zone with only a 4 man rush? I'm sure the Pats were in disbelief at their good fortune.

All that talk all year about winning lunch and our coordinators are the ones to go full fetal when the Super Bowl is on the line.

Hopefully Hackett adjusts for next season. There is a difference between mistake free football and artificially protecting the football in fetal.

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