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Brian Hoyer: Josh McDaniels’s quick thinking won Super Bowl LIII for the Patriots
The former Patriots QB cited McDaniels's halftime adjustments as a major reason for the team's most recent Super Bowl title.
Whatever Josh McDaniels’ faults were in his two stints as a head coach, you can’t deny the former Patriots offensive coordinator could scheme up some offensive football.
In fact, as Brian Hoyer and David Andrews tell it on “The Quick Snap” podcast, New England might not have won its latest Super Bowl championship in the 2018-19 season without McDaniels’s adaptability against ex-LA Rams defensive coordinator Wade Phillips in the big game.
“[Phillips] basically said, “Look, if we do what we’ve done all year, the Patriots are gonna beat us,” Hoyer explained. “What they did is they completely shifted their defensive philosophy.
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” … So they were only going to put their base defense out there if [fullback James] Devlin and [running back] Sony [Michel] were in the game because they knew that those two guys were not going to be part of the passing game. And not only that, when you’re in the running game, you have to be able to account for a down safety, right? We had a certain way in our offense where we would motion mainly [wide receiver] Julian [Edelman] because he was the best blocker of the group where he would be in position to block the safety. So the first few drives, we get there, and we see where the safety is. We motion Julian, and instead of what they had done all year, they completely switched … Now all of a sudden you’re running into a bad look.”
That meant McDaniels and the Patriots had to make adjustments on the fly. Fortunately for the Pats, he was up to the task.
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“That last drive of the game that ends with Sony’s touchdown, we went out there basically in ’13’ personnel (one receiver, three tight ends). We had Sony, Devlin, Dwayne Allen, Gronk and Julian. But we did that in order to throw the ball,” Hoyer said. “That entire thing was drawn up on the sideline in the biggest game of the year with everything on the line.
“It showed obviously the ability for people to adapt, but the willingness to say, look, ‘I know we’ve put a lot of work in, but if we want to win this game, we got to make a huge adjustment. Everybody answered the bell, it was a great drive, and it capped it off with Sony’s touchdown.”
Seems like a lot of offensive coordinators could take some lessons from McDaniels, who also proved he could riff with vastly different QBs than Tom Brady in 2020 (Cam Newton) and 2021 (Mac Jones).
McDaniels, of course, remains unemployed after being fired as the Raiders’ head coach midway through last season. But that doesn’t dampen his championship pedigree as an offensive coordinator and play-caller with the Patriots.
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