Pats Pulpit
The New England Patriots will look to keep their winning streak alive as they travel to Tampa Bay for a matchup with the Buccaneers. Despite the Bucs dealing with injuries even coming off the bye, the matchup will provide New England their toughest task since Buffalo.
So before the action continues, let’s get right into this week’s #PostPulpit Mailbag.
Does Drake Maye hold the ball too long? Does this account for many of his too-many sacks? – Jack Usage
“A lot of the sacks I have taken have been my fault, me holding the football,” Maye said himself on Wednesday.
Through nine games this season Maye has been sacked 34 times, the second-most in football trialing just Cam Ward (38). There are some qualifiers within those numbers, as a handful of the sacks have come with Maye running bounds near the line of scrimmage and New England is near the top of the league in yards lost per sacks.
But, as we broke down in this week’s Maye’s Plays, the quarterback is holding the football too long at times and passing up potential plays through the air. Entering Week 9, Maye ranks seventh-worst in slowest time to throw while New England as a whole ranks fourth-best in slowest time to pressure. The pass protection could certainly be better at times, but the numbers back up the Maye is holding the ball.
Speaking on Thursday, offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels noted how they do not want to “over coach” Maye when it comes to leaving the pocket due to his playmaking ability, however. With some of the sacks also limiting the opportunities to turn the ball over, McDaniels added they’ll continue to try and find the sweet spot when it comes to Maye in the pocket.
Looking at the stats, the pats play zone coverage like 70-75% of the time. One of the higher rates in the league. Yet our secondary with the corners we have is basically built to play man coverage.
So the question is, why do we play so much zone which would seem to be going against our players strengths? Especially since our current pass defense isn’t exactly lock down. We’re only like 19th in passing yards per game despite the resources (both monetary and draft) we have dedicated to our secondary, especially our CBS. – Felkey
To start, it’s very rare for a team to play over 50 percent of their defensive snaps in man coverage — opposing teams are too good and the athletes are too talented. The New York Giants lead the league playing man coverage 44 percent of the time while the Patriots rank 13th at 28.5 percent. Now, I did expect that number to be higher after Mike Vrabel originally mentioned play cat coverage with Christian Gonzalez and Carlton Davis back in March.
As we’ve discussed over the past few weeks New England has also struggled in man coverage throughout the year due to different schematic reasons. Things may be starting to...
