Want to beat the Patriots? Eric Mangini knows how. Mangini’s Browns were the last team to defeat New England, a 34-14 beating of Bill Belichick’s bullies on Nov. 7 in Cleveland, where Mangini and his staff hatched the ultimate blueprint to beat the Patriots.
With that formula in mind, Mangini, the Jets’ head coach from 2006-09 and the Browns’ head man the past two years, gave The Post’s Mark Cannizzaro an exclusive analysis of the AFC divisional playoff game tomorrow at Gillette Stadium.
The Patriots are the best team at not beating themselves. What’s often overlooked is the fact that most games in the league are lost, not won.
New England doesn’t lose the game, and they’re really good at capitalizing on other people’s mistakes. That’s huge.
It all seems simple, but it’s not. I lived it for so long when I coached for Bill Belichick in New England. There’s always this starting point: Don’t lose the game. Don’t put yourself in a position defensively or offensively where you’re giving away plays.
The key component for us in our win over the Patriots was our ability to run the ball and have long drives and not have the self-inflicted wounds.
The Patriots always are going to find the opponents’ strength and attack it. They always are going to work to make you play left-handed. It’s like: “If this is your greatest strength, we’re going to take that away. If you beat us with your second or third thing, fine, but you’re not going to beat us with the thing you do best.”
The first thing the Patriots are going to try to stop is the Jets’ running game. New England is going to have something gameplan specific for this game to help them stop the run.
They’re going to try to keep Mark Sanchez in the pocket and make him throw from the pocket. That’s a real strength of the Jets — Sanchez’s ability to make plays outside the pocket.
The Jets will move the pocket, play bootlegs, throw some fast passes, throw in some misdirection plays. Those are good for Sanchez. He puts pressure on the perimeter of the New England defense.
The Jets have got to have long, sustained drives that end in points. The best way to beat Tom Brady is to not have him on the field. And when he’s on field, make it cloudy, cloudy, cloudy. Eventually he’s going to get you; it’s a law of averages. So the fewer opportunities he has to get you, the better your chances.
Defensively against Brady you have to spin the Rolodex and not let him know what defense you’re in. You have to make sure you don’t show a pattern, not letting it look like he expects it to look. That’s when you have your best shot.
The Patriots will work hard to gather information with long, delayed counts. They may try to speed it up with a no-huddle or quick counts, so it’s a back-and-forth. You’re trying not to give him anything and they’ve got tools to gather information.
In our 2006 game — a 17-14 Jets win over the Patriots at Gillette Stadium, the last time Brady lost at home — we hit Brady a bunch of times because we had a massive commitment to disguise, disguise, disguise and they hadn’t seen it, hadn’t expected it. The next game — a 37-16 New England wild-card win over the Jets — they built in tools to deal with it.
You have to start with a plan against the Patriots, but you better have something else as a changeup. In the Browns’ Nov. 7 win, we had one game plan for the first half and a different game plan for second half. Then we went back to some stuff in second half from first half.
When I came to the Jets, everything was designed and built to beat New England. One of the main reasons I hired offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer was because the Patriots always struggled against that system of shifting and motioning that Schottenheimer does. It’s a very disciplined approach against the role-based offense the Patriots employ. That can be a factor because New England has a young defense.
We drafted to try to beat the Patriots, because if you can’t beat them you can’t win the division. The reason we drafted Nick Mangold was because we needed a center to hold up against the nose guard, which is the driving force in a 3-4 defense, especially for an inside running game. We drafted Mangold to battle Patriots nose tackle Vince Wilfork.
If Mangold can do a good job handling Wilfork on the inside, the Jets will have success running the ball. I think the Jets can run the ball on New England if they are patient. They can run the ball and they can use Sanchez to get out of the pocket, which puts pressure on the entire defense. New England has struggled on third down (allowing a 47.1 conversion rate).
The Jets have a lot of great matchups to pressure the inside of the Patriots defense with tight end Dustin Keller and wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery, and they have two outstanding receivers on the outside, Braylon Edwards and Santonio Holmes.