Edelman is Back and Gronk is Playing. Does This Solve All Our Problems?

So now that Schefter started my NFL Thursday off with the morning wood news that Rob Gronkowski is playing tonight against the Colts, it’s worth noting how big a deal this is. How huge it is that Gronk and Julian Edelman, the Groot and Rocket of professional sports …

… will be playing together for the first time in forever. It almost can’t be overstated how huge this is.

Consider the following. This is how many times Gronk and Edelman have been on the field together since 2015, the season Minitron broke his foot against the Giants in Week 9 before making it back for the playoffs:

–2015: Patriots Games Played: 18. Games with both players: 11
–2016: Patriots Games Played: 19. Games with both players: 8
–2017: Patriots Games Played: 19. Games with both players: 0
–2018: Patriots Games Played: 4. Games with both players: 0

That’s a total of 60 games for the team, 19 with Gronk and Edelman. Factor in Tom Brady’s Deflategate suspension, and you get a total of 17 games in which their three most important offensive players have been on the field at the same time. And when you consider that in 4 of the 8 games Gronk played in 2016 he was basically a decoy and targeted 3 times or less, you’re looking at really about 21 percent of the time they’ll all been together while reasonably healthy over the last 3+ seasons. Most importantly, they haven’t taken the field together in the postseason since the AFC championship game at Denver three years ago.

So yeah, it’s not putting too fine a point on it to say this is big. And having Edelman back – with Gronkowski and Brady, should be transformative for this offense.

Like gender at a liberal arts college, it’s wrong to describe Patriots receivers in binary terms. But I got my degree in business, so I’m going to go right ahead and cisreceiver them into slots and wideouts for the purposes of this discussion. (As to the question of which bathroom I want them to use? The bathroom in the winning locker room, only.) According to Pro Football Focus, who keeps track of these things, Chris Hogan is the Pats receiver who has lined up in the slot the most this season, 84 times through four games. That is 61.3 percent of snaps, which is a ludicrous amount for him. By way of comparison, Phillip Dorsett is at 27 snaps (21.3 percent) and Cordarelle Patterson is at 15 (26.3 percent). And in Edelman’s last season he was only in the slot 53.5 percent of the time. Hogan is a 6-1, 210 lb deep threat/red zone target. Lining him up inside almost 2/3 of the time is like putting Josh Groban in a buddy cop show. He can physically pull it off, but it’s hardly the best use of his talent.

And the Patriots system keys on having a guy lining up inside with Edelman’s specific skill set of precision route-running, command of reading coverages, willingness to run into traffic, toughness and good hands. It always has. There’s a reason why Troy Brown’s career highs were 41 receptions for 607 yards in his first seven seasons, but ballooned to 83 for 944 in 2000 when Charlie Weis installed the Erhardt-Perkins system. Then when Brady became the starter the following year, exploded to 101 for 1199. Because Brown was the prototype for the position. Then Wes Welker became the 2.0 version and Edelman was the upgrade over him.

Having a guy who can do what those guys – and I’ll add Danny Amendola to round out that Fantastic Four for sure – is everything because of what this system tries to accomplish. The cliche’ is that some offenses stretch defenses vertically and others stretch them horizontally. The Erhardt-Perkins stretches them trigonomically. Meaning they attack the triangle formed by the cornerback-end-outside linebacker or the cornerback-end-strong safety, depending. Send two or three receivers in combo routes to stretch not the whole field, but the zones within the coverage, and exploit the weak parts. Which is why it’s so essential to have a receiver agile enough to make quick cuts away from the coverage and versatile enough to line up anywhere. To run similar routes from a variety of formations so that you present the defense too many options to adjust to. As Weis once explained it, “You get different looks without changing (the quarterback’s) reads. You don’t need an open-ended number of plays.”

We saw almost not of that versatility against Jacksonville or Detroit. Last week against Miami we got the Trader Joe’s sample counter tasting of it with Dorsett getting a little more involved. But add Edelman, doing what he was put on this Earth to do so that everyone else can go back to their traditional roles and the offense we’ve been used to for 18 or so years will make its triumphant return.

Oh wait. I haven’t even mentioned Josh Gordon. I positively forgot him until now. Gronk. Edelman. Gordon. With Hogan and Dorsett as depth guys and Patterson just returning kicks? What looked like a disaster four weeks ago has a chance to be the best all-around receiving corps this team has ever had. Pats by 100 tonight.