Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and his staff could see what the Cowboys were attempting to do to their offense right off the bat on Sunday. Dallas came out with a dime look, with three defensive linemen and two linebackers.
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This is usually reserved for passing downs, so it was clear that the Cowboys wanted to defend against the pass first and put on as much pressure as possible right away. Their plan worked, and the Cowboys got five sacks and five hits on Pats quarterback Tom Brady early.
After the game, Belichick got a good laugh when asked about a well-known cliche in football: halftime adjustments.
"Halftime adjustments, I mean that's ridiculous," Belichick said, via WEEI 93.7 FM. "Why wait till halftime? There it is. The first series of plays you can see what they're going to do, so you better start dealing with it. There are other teams that maybe anticipate that you're going to play a certain way and they script the plays, and a lot of times the scripts are to break their tendencies like, OK we've done this so we're going to start the game and show this but do that. We want to get the ball to this guy because we want to try to get him going, so we're going to put this play in. So maybe those first few plays are just how they want to start the game. Maybe that's not really the game plan at all."
Clearly, the notion of waiting until halftime to make those adjustments is just plain silly.
