How the Patriots used special teams ace Brenden Schooler in an unfamiliar defensive role
"It was my first career sack ever, going back to Pop Warner, high school and college, so it was a pretty cool feeling."
The Patriots notched nine sacks as a team in the win over the Bears on Sunday, with one of them coming from an unexpected source.
Brenden Schooler, New England’s 27-year-old special teams ace, made a rare appearance as part of the defense, logging a few snaps in the 19-3 victory. Patriots’ defensive coordinator DeMarcus Covington used Schooler’s athleticism as a quarterback “spy” (a term used for a defender tasked with tracking the quarterback to prevent scrambling).
Schooler marked his debut with a sack on Chicago rookie Caleb Williams in the third quarter:
“That’s our Longhorn package,” Patriots coach Jerod Mayo explained after the game, citing the name of the specific unit that utilized Schooler on defense. “We’ve done things like that before. Again, we talk about next man up. Now you’ve got a guy who was primarily a special teams player making contributions. It’s probably his first sack ever in his career, but he’s fast, he’s athletic, and he’s a football player. We try not to put anyone in a box, and I’m not going to put anyone [there].”
Schooler gave some background on the game plan.
“It started early on the week, they told me this is kind of what we’re going to be doing. There were a couple of different ways we were going to be getting to it today, so every single time third down was up I was looking over at [DeMarcus Covington] seeing if he was going to throw up the ‘Longhorn’ signal for me to get in there.
“Super excited to get in there and help the team in any way we can today,” Schooler added.
Beyond the short-term team implications, the sack on Williams was also a personal milestone for Schooler.
“It was awesome,” he said of the moment. “It was my first career sack ever, going back to Pop Warner [youth football], high school and college, so it was a pretty cool feeling.”
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