Zolak & Bertrand: Should the Patriots scrap the “outside zone” run game?

The Patriots fell to the Raiders 23-6 in their preseason finale in Las Vegas on Friday night. The story of the night was the sluggish play of the first team offense, which saw Mac Jones & Co. play well into the 2nd quarter before they put together a decent drive.

On Sunday, Andrew Callahan of the Boston Herald wondered if it was time to "pivot" from the outside zone run scheme that the Patriots implemented this offseason. Zolak and Bertrand shared their thoughts on whether that could happen.

Beetle: Let's go big picture here. Is it okay to now be worried about where this team is going this year if they stick with this?

Zolak: I'd be worried because it's a lot of the same. Right? It's the same continually week to week to week to week. And now we're at the point now you got two weeks. Now it's game plan week. Their defense is, "we're evaluating guys individually, we don't game plan yet." What if it looks like this after you game plan for a couple of weeks? That's where you hit the alarm.

Beetle: How do you game plan when you don't have a full grasp on what you're doing? Forget reacting to what the other team is going to do and what you expect to see in the game.

Zolak: Yeah. Maybe you're going to simplify it even more. I don't know.

Beetle: "Your guys don't have a full grasp on your offense, never mind what they're going to see from the opposing defense."

Zolak: That's the best thing you're going to have about Monday when you get install, and the quarterback goes in with the offensive coaches, whichever ones are going to be calling plays and you're sitting there with the head coach, and you go up on the whiteboard. Here's our third down, second down, first down, passing all here on the board. You go up and you remove what you don't like. Because if you can't pull the trigger and you don't believe in it, we're not calling it. What are you comfortable with? And he's going to tell him what his [two-minute plays] are, what his first down passing is.

And it's going to be up to the running game ground game coordinator, whether it's a lineman, whether it's Patricia and, you know, Billy Yates and those guys just, OK, what runs do we do? Well, what don't we do well? And the ones that we absolutely get our ass kicked on and blown up, we throw those in the trash can. That's where the game plan can help them. So, I need to see real games. I need to see real games before you can say, man, this needs to be scrapped or, boy, this thing is not going to work out. I mean, you're at a critical juncture point now.

Beetle: They've got problems up front. They've got problems offensively where they're not grasping everything that they should be running at this point. And I don't even know if it's fair to say that they should fully understand it at this point. I just know that they don't. And listen, I'm not smart enough to know how it is that you take your offense, you scrap it, you start over and you're doing it with coaches who have never coached offense. I don't know how that works. And so far, just from what we're able to see, it hasn't worked.

Zolak: I wonder like when you cut it up in a pie chart, what percentage of that - him bringing back his guys that never called offensive plays but 'this is the direction I'm going to go in' - has factored into us really trying to simplify and streamline things? Now, the Brady offense got to a ridiculous point. I mean, the verbiage was, you know, you're - Tom ends up tagging things and making up stuff and adding to it.

Beetle: But last time I checked, Tom Brady wasn't playing for the Patriots last year, and Mac Jones was, and Mac Jones played pretty well at times. I mean, there are other times he didn't play as well, but he had a good year.

Zolak: Well, I think the kid mentally gets it.

Beetle: He had a good year. And I think what we've seen from him this preseason is not what we saw from him last year in the regular season. He's taken a step back. That's very frustrating to see as a fan. Because we know he's better than this. We know it was better than what he did on Friday night. He's better than that. That's not who he is.

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