Locked On Patriots - Daily Podcast On The New England Patriots - Locked On Patriots December 14, 2018 - Take Thursday

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

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Hey there everybody, Mark Schofield slotted into the big chair on this Thursday, December 13th, 2018 for a Take Thursday installment of the Lockdown Patriots podcast, your favorite daily Patriots podcast, or at least maybe one of your favorite daily patriots podcast or at least maybe one of your favorite daily patriots podcasts i don't know i'm just happy you're here with me on this fantastic thursday we're going to get to a couple different things today we got one question in from our fearless listener john lamarakis who was also featured on a nesson short by the way i tweeted it out check that out on my timeline at mark scofield which is where you can follow me in all my work at places like inside the pylon.com pro football weekly the score matt waldman's rookie scouting portfolio big blue view part of the

nation family of websites friends if there's an outlet covering football in the game we all know and love chances are i'm doing some work for them as i said we get a show a question from john that we're going to get to a little bit later also want to talk a little mitchell trubisky a little carson wentz but first i wanted to sort of get into something. This is, after all, the Take Thursday show. And the idea and the impetus behind the Take Thursday show was basically to bring something out from the Twitter timeline. That was the initial idea behind it.

It was actually an idea, believe it or not, coined by our great friend John Ledyard, co-host of the Locked On NFL Draft podcast here in the Locked On Podcast Network. Back when John and I were doing a podcast together over at InsideThePylon.com, we had an idea that, look, we'll do something called Timeline Takes, where literally we would sit down, record a podcast, scroll through our timeline, and then anytime we saw something that was interesting or of note, we would just start riffing on it.

And that grew into Take Thursday, where the idea and the hope is that I get questions in from all of you. But as a backup plan, I can just revert to that old sort of format of timeline takes and scroll through the timeline. And I was going to do that. But then I found something that I figured I could spend an entire segment on. And that's what we're going to do here at the outset. It's a fantastic piece done by Tyler Dunn over at Bleacher Report. And the idea and the premise of the piece, the title is, Does Tom Brady Still Have It? Bleacher Report Asks NFL Experts and Legends.

And Dunn basically gets a bunch of different people to go on the record. Warren Moon, Drew Bledsoe, Joe Theismann, Matt Hasselbeck, Bruce Arians, Trent Green, Darren Woodson, and Tom House, Tom's personal quarterback coach, or at least one of them. And it's a fantastic piece. It's so well done. It's broken down into different segments. There's tom versus time

where they talk about sort of the age factor there's what they call internal forces we're going to talk about that in a minute there's what they call sort of the external forces the things it might be pulling brady away from the game of football you know the other things he has going on in his life there's living in the now that sort of gets into how Brady's playing right at this moment, which is fantastic. Again, it's a fantastic, fantastic piece. I want to start just for a few minutes with this little bit on the internal factors. And we hear and elsewhere, I'm not the only person that talks about how Brady is a maniac. I think he would be the first to sort of admit it.

And in this section on sort of internal forces, Dunn relates this story from Joe Theismann. The story begins like this. It was Super Bowl 50, and Tom Brady, forever the headliner on the game's marquee, was not in San Francisco to play football. No, he was there for endorsements and appearances like so many others. And at one event, Joe Theismann asked Brady how he was doing. Theismann expected Brady to say things are good or family's great.

Instead, Brady fumed with a searing glare. Terrible, Brady said. What do you mean terrible, asked Theismann, concerned. I hate being here. I belong out there on that football field. To everyone, that's quintessential Tom Brady, a ruthless assassin who could excel deep into his 40s because nobody's wired like him. It's a borderline sickness, friends say. He has never forgotten that he was the 199th pick in the draft. He's obsessed with finding that 1%, that minuscule,

impossible-to-see way to improve. Maybe then-teammate Kenny Britt put it best during Super Bowl week a year ago. He's an alien. I don't even think he's from this universe to tell you the truth. Stephon Gilmore calls it an inner dog that only the Bradys, the Jordans, and the Kobes possess. But Dunn asks this question. How long can this maniacal drive

ring after ring fuel Brady? And then they get into stories with Hasselbeck talking about how he can get quarterback sneaks to advance yardage, even though everybody knows it's coming. Bruce Arians talking about, and this is something that I think is really important. Arians, the AFC Championship game when I was in Pittsburgh, he was on fire that night.

And any time he's playing a hot shot young quarterback, Andrew Luck a couple of times, Mahomes, when he's playing the young ones, he really wants to show out. There's no doubt. His competitive spirit is amazing. And for many of us, and I put myself in this category, Brady's competitive spirit, that internal fire, is the one thing that is going to set him apart from everybody else

when all is said and done. And it is that one thing that when this topic comes up is, does Brady still have it? Is he losing it? Has he lost a step? Has he hit the cliff that I will come back to and say, no, he's not going to hit any cliff. He's not going to have this decline. If there's a guy that's going to stare that decline in the face and push it back, it's Tom Brady. If there's a guy that's going to stare that decline in the face and push it back, it's Tom Brady. If there's a guy that's going to stop the sunset and push that sun back into the sky for one last Sunday afternoon, it's Tom Brady. And part of my thinking on that comes, and I will admit, maybe this isn't the best sort of reference point, but from myself. And what I mean by that is, as somebody that has played the position, and certainly not at Tom Brady's level or anywhere close to it,

certainly not anywhere close to Division I football. There does come a point when you realize that maybe this isn't for me. Maybe I don't have it anymore. And you can hit that point, whether it's high school or early in your college career, and you can go down two paths. You can go down the road of, look, this was fun, but now I'm just going to ride this out until it's time to hand it up. Or you can go in a different direction. And clearly somebody that has made it to the National Football League

goes down that other path. But then there's the people that go down that path, another fork in the road. When they have to decide if they're going to be great or the greatest. And what drives those people to become the greatest is that ridiculous chip on their shoulder for many of them, that ability to create motivation when sometimes the motivating factors might not be present. Michael Jordan, cut from his high school basketball

team, gets into the Hall of Fame, mentions it during his speech. Tom Brady, pick 199, will always be pick 199. This is why when I look at a Baker Mayfield, I see a guy that always will remember that he was a double walk-on and will never let anybody forget it. And so bringing this back to Brady, that's the thing that will always set him apart day in and day out. It's that inner fire inside of him. So when he sees people saying,

look, he's losing it, that he's lost a little bit of velocity or whatever. He's going to go back to the person that initially made that decision at that fork. And maybe it was when he had a guy like Drew Henson pushing him from behind and people in Michigan didn't believe him. Other people might have said, okay, well, you know what? I've run my course. It's cutting me to Michigan.

I'm going to go sell insurance or whatever, like he talked about in that Brady 6 ESPN special. But he didn't choose that road. He didn't choose that path. He went down the other one. He was picking 199. He looked Robert Kraft in the eye and said, you will be the best decision this organization ever made. And he made sure that he lived up to that promise. Anyway, check out that piece from Tyler Dunn. I think it's fantastic. I just wanted to opine on that for a little bit. Up next, we're going to talk a little Carson Wentz.

We're going to talk a little Mitchell Trubisky. Two young quarterbacks seemingly perhaps going in different directions right now. I wanted to chime in on that. But first, we have such a fantastic opportunity for all of the listeners to the Locked On Patriots podcast, and that is this. We have a great new relationship we are building with our friends over at DraftKings, and here's the deal. Look, we all know this Sunday is a massive, massive opportunity for the New England Patriots to sort of make their stamp on this

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for free this week with your first deposit and compete for your share of over $1 million in total prizes. That's code LOCKEDON only at DraftKings, the game inside the game. Minimum $5 deposit required. Eligibility restrictions apply. See DraftKings.com for details. And folks, I'm going to be setting up one of these leagues. You can check it out. I'll be tweeting out links and stuff. Just keep following me on Twitter at Mark Schofield for more. Mark Schofield back with you now on this Take Thursday installment of Locked on Patriots. And since we got just the one question from the listeners this week, we're going to build to that into the third segment of the show.

But keeping in the spirit of the genesis of the Take Thursday show, so to speak. I wanted to deal with two different takes from the timeline, one of which was by yours truly. Hey, opportunity to pimp my own work. What can I say? I'm going to take advantage of it. But first, I've been doing a new podcast with our great friend Michael Kist, formerly of Locked On Eagles, now running the podcast Empire over at Bleeding Green Nation, part of the SB Nation family of websites.

And the show that Michael and I are doing is called The QB Sko Show. Nice, catchy little title. And what we do is we break down sort of the upcoming quarterback that the Philadelphia Eagles are going to go up against. So a lot of Patriots fans that listen to the show probably could not care less, and I more than understand. We also work in some historical references. For example, at the start of every show, I drop a historical reference, and then Michael works one in as well, and we try to keep it somewhat kind of with the theme of what we're going to talk about.

For example, a show two weeks ago, we were talking about the Cowboys, so I dropped some knowledge about how we have this idea in our heads that the Wild West was filled with bank robbers. And in reality, the Council on Economic Forum, there was FEE, I forget the exact group, but there was this Council of Economists that actually researched bank robberies in the Wild West, and they found that there were like less than 10. But the reason why they've become so mythologized is because they were so hard to pull off. Why? The bank was always in the middle of the town and the way these old Western towns were built, you had buildings on either side of

them and the bankers usually lived upstairs. So it was really hard to get in and out and pull off a bank heist, which is why when somebody did it, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it was a big deal. You know, this week, we're talking about a man going west and seeking his fortune and getting some help along the way. I tell a story about Kit Carson, who helped tame the epic American West, so to speak. But when he was 16, he was serving an apprenticeship, learning how to make saddles. But he found the work boring, so he hitched on with a trail, a wagon trail going West, a caravan to serve as a gunner on it. But he ditched his apprenticeship and his boss by law was required to put out a notice. So he did a month later and he sent people

North instead of West. And he offered the huge heaping reward of one cent does that remind you of a quarterback out in the west getting help from the man i was talking about jerry golf and sean mcfay anyway long story short we do this show and we recorded it wednesday afternoon again it's an Eagle show. When the news drops that Carson Wentz might be shut down for the season, he's been dealing with some lingering back spasms. And that touched off a debate on the timeline as to whether Carson Wentz was actually injury prone. So Mike and I immediately chimed in on that.

And I wanted to chime in on it here because I feel that there has been this sort of let's put it this way the fate of three quarterbacks Jared Goff, Dak Prescott, and Carson Wentz will be inextricably intertwined for the rest of their careers one was picked first, one was picked

second, one wasn't picked until the fourth round, but all three of them are now starting quarterbacks in the same conference. And it seems like, particularly when it comes to Dak and Wentz, the Wentz war, so to speak, which raged on the Twitter timeline two summers ago, we'll say, Dak and Wentz being in the NFC East, those two will forever be linked. And it seems like whenever one is playing well, the other seems to be playing a little bit poorly.

And maybe that's what we're seeing this year. And it always seems like we see with many sports-related arguments, if one is good, the other has to be awful. And so there are always these Warren factions trying to pit one against the other. But with Wentz right now, there seems to be a little bit of revisionist history as to whether he was an injury-prone quarterback coming out of college. And what people point to is the fact that he missed the bulk of his senior year because of a broken bone in his wrist, which he hit on a helmet following through on a pass. Now, let's remember he played through that injury initially. He finished the game and he suffered the injury in.

And then, yes, he gets shut down for a period of time. They go on, North Dakota State, make the playoffs, make it to a championship game, and he works his way back into the lineup. And he starts in that championship game and they win that championship game. And yes, didn't play great. There was some rust coming back from injury, long layoff, but he works his way back. And then his rookie year, plays the entire rookie year. People say, well, look, he missed his preseason. Okay. He missed the preseason because somebody didn't pick up a blitz and he suffered a cracked rib. And there's actually an article out there frank reich basically saying he's not an injury prone guy this was just one of those football hits he couldn't avoid it that's kind of what happens

and people say well you know he he missed he missed you know four games he missed the preseason that's so important for a young quarterback you know If he had played in that preseason, maybe they would have had a better year. Okay, well, let's remember something about this team. Carson Wentz started in all 16 of those games. He started the week one opener when they beat Cleveland. And you remember, that was sort of the, you know, Wentz Bowl because Cleveland had traded out of a position where they could have drafted Wentz.

He started in week two when they beat the Chicago Bears on a Monday night game. He started week three when they blew out the Steelers 34-3. You remember, they started 3-0 that year. Wentzvania. Joe Biden out there-0 that year. Wentzvania. Joe Biden out there talking about how good Carson Wentz is. But then they faltered. But he played all 16 games last year.

And then last year, he has this sort of freak ACL injury. And this year, some lingering back spasms. This idea that coming out of college, Carson Wentz was this injury-prone quarterback, I think is a bit of a revisionist history. I think it's easy to say it now, given that he's been dealing with some of these back issues. It's not like a Gronkowski issue where there was a structural thing. As far as we know, it's just back spasms. I'm a man. I'm almost 42.

I get them sometimes. Just saying. The other quarterback I wanted to talk about briefly, ever so briefly, is young Mitchell Trubisky. As most of you know, maybe you don't. New listeners, always happy to have you aboard. I do a lot of work over at Pro Football Weekly. Each week I break down Mitchell Trubisky, the Trubisky as it were.

And what was interesting about watching him this week is there's an issue with him that still lingers to this day. And it is that left foot of his, that lead foot of his. And so I wrote a piece focused entirely, well, not entirely, but the bulk of it was focused on that front left foot. And I did what I sometimes do when I feel like maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I'm wrong. So I pulled out off the shelf this book that I have, Coaching the Quarterback by the Experts.

And it's edited by Earl Brown, and it's one of those sort of coaching clinic books that takes together the presentations put together by lots of other smart football people and reprints them in a book format. So you've got Ken Anderson, former Bengals quarterback, then a coach, about coaching the quarterback. You've got Ralph Friedgen, formerly head coach at University of Maryland, teaching quarterbacks to attack defenses. Paul Hackett, formerly of South USC, training the young quarterback. Paul Hamilton, the wishbone quarterback stuff.

You've got Scott Linehan, now with the Cowboys, quarterback techniques and drills and so on. And, you know, I went through and I found out, you know, multiple, multiple examples that reminded me that, look, I'm not wrong on this. When you watch Trubisky, you watch his left foot. He is consistently overstepping, particularly when thrown to the left. And I don't mean he's like stepping too far straight. He's stepping too far to the left. He's opening up that left hip and stepping almost parallel to the line of scrimmage. And what's amazing is you can see it impact so many of his throws, so many of his interceptions, misses these throws high and

outside so much. And it's an issue that dated back to his college days at UNC and it is still there. And what was really interesting to me was I found this quote that I put in there, and we're going to get to a sort of tie-in in a second. But what I thought was fascinating was this. It was a quote from a high school coach. And people might say, well, high school coach? What is a high school coach? Now, look, I mean, high school school coaches they do a lot of work teaching young players how to play the game especially this is when as a quarterback you're learning the bulk of

your fundamentals so your high school coach is pretty important this one high school coach step and throw on the same line your momentum should be in the direction of the throw this is where we get into the accuracy part more than anything else and that was kind of like the capper to my argument. Look, I've got all these coaches, all these offensive minds, former quarterbacks, drilling into your head, the proper mechanics, stepping towards the target. Even with that, there's a caveat. You really want to step two to three inches to the left of the target when you're throwing as a right-handed quarterback because that will allow you to really turn the hip through and get torque. But still, you want to be stepping towards the target when you're throwing as a right-handed quarterback because you that will allow you to really turn the hip through and get torque but still

you want to be stepping towards the target not towards the sideline the high school coach that made that statement in his clinic presentation was one Tom McDaniels from Canton McKinley High School in Ohio and yes the father of Josh McDaniels so I wanted to tie that in here at Locked on Patriots. Up next, we're going to talk our one question of the week from our great, great friend, John Malamrakis. I tweeted out his little Nessun hit. Got interviewed and everything.

But life down in Texas as a Boston sports fan. So you definitely want to check that out. Again, it's on my timeline. But before we do that, reminder about our great friends over at Action out. Again, it's on my timeline. But before we do that, reminder about our great friends over at Action Heat. Folks, we are getting close. This is our show for December 14th, meaning we are like 10 days away,

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That's actionheat.com slash locked on or use the coupon code locked on at checkout to save 20%. Stay toasty warm while you enjoy all your outdoor activities this winter with Action Heat. And we thank them for sponsoring the podcast. Mark Schofield back here on the Locked On Patriots podcast and we got a second question in. Fantastic. I'm proud of you guys. First, our great friend John Lamarakis, is

there anyone, aside from Flowers, that you trust on the defensive line? And I will say that there is. There you go. Now, I'll elaborate. And what's surprising to me about the player

that I'm going to reference here in a second is that I wouldn't have expected it because when you were putting together, you know, your preview pieces or early season thoughts on this Patriots defense, you were thinking maybe a Danny Shelton who has been a healthy scratch the past two weeks, or maybe a Malcolm Brown, or maybe

a Dietrich Wise. We knew Flowers, but Dietrich Wise, maybe Keonta Davis, all the guys who were making some contributions. But then there were guys that we were sort of on the roster bubble, like the guy we're about to talk about.

But all he's done this season is go out and be one of the better defensive linemen in the league a matter of fact go to the pro football folks and again say what you want about their grading you can take it with a grain of salt look they have a process in place the grades get reviewed and tinkered with and revisited each week so they've got a process in place. Lawrence Guy is the ninth-ranked, ninth-graded defensive lineman in the league with a grade of 89.8, which is, again, ninth in the league, puts him in the good category. And what's been amazing about him is his ability against the run, whether it's just making the running back cut or even just making the stop himself, is a big reason why the Patriots' run defense has been good at

times this year. As they wrote in the aftermath of the game against the Vikings, Lawrence Guy continues to make a case for being the best run defending lineman in the National Football League this year. He made two stops in the run game and altered a handful of others. And even earlier in the year, you know, they had a piece from a couple of months ago back at the end of September where they had sort of the biggest surprises of the NFL season. You know, a player that they mentioned again was Lawrence Guy. You know, Guy's another player that has been around for a while since 2012 without making much of an impact. He's never played fewer than 208 snaps per season, and at that time he's never produced a grade above 75 in any year. However, through week three, Guy's emerged as a

run-stopping machine while occasionally pressuring the quarterback. The veteran interior defender has generated nine stops against the run, tied for position and his run stop percentage of 15.5 is sixth best he stood out in week two earning a spot on the pff nfl secret superstars list for the week for his play against the jaguars and that was when his grade was 89.9 and since then yeah it's ticked down 1.1. Actually, no. He's ticked down 0.1. So he's basically been consistent, at least by their grade in this year. And so John, that's the guy I would point to. Lawrence guy.

He's been a surprise. He's been a revelation. Fantastic to see from him. The other question we got in from Chuck A. Both of these questions come to us from the Locked On Patriots Slack channel, which you want to be a member of. You're probably going to want to be a member of it for

this weekend. Huge game against the Steelers. What causes otherwise good, solid teams to be so bad on the road? Why is the Pats defense so porous? Why do the Steelers stink? It's not like the Dolphins or Raiders crowds morphed into Seattle's 12th man. Just wondering. And I'm reminded of one of John Madden's books right now. I think it was One Knee Equals Two Feet. I'm not positive. I read it probably when

I was like 10 or 11. And he related this story about traveling with a football team. And remember, Madden didn't like to fly, but he did it for the most part when he was coaching. But once he retired and stepped away from coaching, that's when he pretty much stopped flying. But it wasn't so much a singular event or story but he talked about how football players are creatures of habit and if you think about life as a football player it's you know everything is scheduled and set to a routine and you know like say for example when

i was in college um double sessions, when they started in August, every first practice each morning, specialists, you mean kickers, punters, lawn snappers, holders, had to be out at the lovely hour of 5.30 in the morning, meaning you're on the field at 5.30. That's fantastic, isn't it? I mean, I remember my freshman year walking to the practice fields as other people that I had met during orientation

were coming home for the night. That's a tough one. That's a tough one, but I digress. So you're out there at 5.30. Then quarterbacks and centers are out there at 5.40 to practice snaps. 5.50, wide receivers are out there and running backs to work on routes. And then 6 o'clock, first whistle to start practice.

I mean, that's the way it is every single day of double sessions. And that's just one example. But everything is regimented. Everything is set to a schedule. You know when your meetings are. You know when your meetings are. You know when your install meetings are. Your position meetings are. You know what the practices are going to be like down to basically the minute because they're all scheduled. Football players are creatures of habit. When football players and teams are traveling, there can be

sort of unexplained, unexpected events that throw a monkey wrench into that. And Madden would say that, look, you have to sort of keep them updated because if it goes a minute past what they're expecting, they're going to start to wonder. And so my only thing that I can come up with is that forget the crowds and the noise factor and all of the other stuff. Just being on the road takes you out of your environment. And it can be an adjustment. And I know it sounds a little silly to think about, well, these guys are in their 20s and 30s and 40s.

They can't go on a business trip. It's not like going to make the sales pitch where you go from your hotel to your meeting to the hotel to the airport. It's a little different. And you're still running the show yourself. You're not just one cog in the wheel, in the machine. So that's my first sort of off the cuff answer. Honestly, I don't know. Again, look, do any of us really trust this Patriots defense on the road right now? It hasn't been great so far. It is a concern.

What's not a concern? The rest of the show. Because we're done. I'm out. I'll be back tomorrow with your game day edition of Locked On Patriots. We're going to talk expectations for Sunday. We're going to talk playoff scenarios and all the other stuff going on around the league. And we can start talking bowl games.

We've got bowl games this weekend to get into. That's going on around the league. And we can start talking bowl games. We've got bowl games this weekend to get into. That's going to make it fun. It's always fun. It's always fun being with you. Again, leave some reviews on iTunes. Get those iTunes reviews out there. Check out the Twitter machine at Mark Schofield on Twitter.

Going to be doing that. DraftKings stuff, check that out as well. Hope to see some of you in there. Until next time, keep it locked right here to me, Mark Scofield, and Locked on Patreons.