The New England Patriots took their act on the road this week, teaming up with the Minnesota Vikings for a pair of joint practices. The challenge proved to be a substantial one for the team of head coach Mike Vrabel, especially on the offensive side of the ball.
While New England did manage to land its punches, primarily on Day 1, the two-day event as a whole was, for lack of a better term, “won” by the home team. Vrabel and his club, meanwhile, are left looking for silver linings.
Despite the difficulties, it doesn’t take long to find some.
For the Patriots, after all, the two practices presented an invaluable opportunity to bond and learn. While they already went up against the Washington Commanders for one day of joint work last week in Foxborough, the Vikings proved to be a different beast. One man in particular is responsible for that: defensive coordinator, and longtime Patriots assistant, Brian Flores.
“He tries to create chaos, and I think that’s good for us to see and know,” said quarterback Drake Maye. “Sometimes at the line, you may not know, ‘Hey, is this guy coming, or are they just bluffing that?’ So, it’s good for us to see it, and it’s great for us to learn from.”
Flores spent 11 seasons in New England under head coach Bill Belichick, including the final one as a top lieutenant on the defensive side of the ball. That year, in 2018, he helped lead a defense that delivered one of the best performances in Super Bowl history, holding an explosive Los Angeles Rams offense to just three points. Since then, he continued to tinker with his defense and make it ever more difficult to decipher.
Maye and company got that experience first-hand this week, and it led to some rough results. While the quarterback himself performed reasonably well, he found himself under repeated duress: New England’s offensive line had its hands full.
And yet, that unit also sees positive in the experience.
“It makes you question. It makes you think a little bit,” said offensive tackle Morgan Moses of Flores’ defense. “When you get to the line as an offense, you want to be able to play fast. He has a lot of exotic looks and things that you’ve probably never seen before, and sometimes it makes you play a little bit slow. That’s what makes that defense go, and to be able to out there for those two days and to be able to get that has been quality work for us.”
“I think we blocked it up when we got it right,” added Maye. “I think there’s times where they’re going to get us. That’s what he does.”
The hope in New England is that the lessons learned these two days can set the stage for improved long-term performance. But even considering the difficulties, there were some concrete positives beyond the “valuable experience” point of view.
Maye himself, as noted above, had some encouraging moments considering the circumstances — a point of view shared by his head coach after the first day.
“It’s easy to go into blender when you’re seeing a bunch of this stuff and kind of scrambling and turning one less-than-favorable play into a real s—tstorm. I didn’t see that,” Vrabel said on Thursday. “I thought he was able to process. We didn’t execute all the time, but I didn’t see any panic from him. I thought he was able to communicate and get the things that he wanted and then hit some plays because of it. When we blocked him, we were able to make some plays.”
Besides Maye, the Patriots also received positive contributions from rookies such as TreVeyon Henderson or Efton Chism. On defense, New England’s pass rush — led by the likes of Christian Barmore and Harold Landry — proved to be a problem for Minnesota at times.
At the end of the day, however, all of those performances, just like those on the other end of the spectrum, need to be taken with a grain of salt. As wide receiver DeMario Douglas pointed out following Thursday’s session, it’s still practice we are talking about.
“It’s not going to be great right now. It’s training camp — we’re still bonding, getting together and learning each other,” he explained.
“If it were in the game, that’s when it’s frustrating. But we’re in practice. I feel like we learn from what we see on tape. We’re going to go to this tape, watch tape, and correct it. This is a practice where you’re not really too much watching film on them the whole week and then playing them. You’re really just watching film on how we practiced and then go and adjust. So, once we go to game week and watch this the whole week, then it’ll become like second nature, like, ’Oh, I’ve seen this. He’s doing this, he’s doing this, and then you know.’ It’s tough, but it’s practice.”
Ultimately, more than anything, that might be the biggest silver lining coming out of those two days at TCO Performance Center in Eagan, MN: the learning potential is immense and should positively impact the Patriots in the long run.
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