If it were a movie, they would have billed the Wildcat offense as the feel-good hit of the 2008 season, a blockbuster no one saw coming.
It gave new life to the flagging career of Ricky Williams, made Ronnie Brown one of the most valuable offensive threats in the league and made the Dolphins — 1-15 the year before — a division champion.
But like any blockbuster, the sequel always struggles to live up to the original.
The Wildcat still is enjoying some success thanks in large part to the crisp execution of Williams and Brown, but it’s not the dramatic surprise it was last season. The rest of the league slowly has started to catch up. The Jets held the Dolphins to 104 total yards from scrimmage Sunday, and the week before, the Saints yielded just 27 yards on 14 Wildcat snaps.
After keeping a modified version of the Wildcat in check earlier this year — the Broncos ran their Wildhorse offense against the Patriots last month with mixed results — New England will take its crack at Miami this week when the Dolphins come to Foxboro.
On Monday, Patriots coach Bill Belichick said Miami’s Wildcat still presents myriad problems, starting with how much practice time should be used in the week leading up to the game preparing for it.
“We want to be able to defend [the Wildcat], but at the same time, we don’t want to commit so much time to it that we don’t do a good job on the other things they do as well,” Belichick said on a conference call with reporters. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to use a little bit of the extra time this week to get those bases covered. But it’s definitely a preparation problem they present.”
Time is certainly on the Patriots' side. A usual work week would mean an off-day on Tuesday, but because of the bye week — and the long weekend given to the players by Belichick and the coaching staff — New England will have five full days to devote to Miami.
Another thing the Patriots have in their favor is the fact that New England has also had the bye week to prepare — under Belichick, they are 7-2 in their first games following an idle weekend.
“I think the most important thing is that we’re sound on it and we’re prepared for it. If we get it, we at least know how to play it and the different things that come out of it. But they certainly do a lot of other offensive groups — formations and personnel grouping besides that, and we have to be ready for all those,” Belichick said. “It’s certainly a challenging aspect to the whole preparation process.”
In a September matchup at Gillette last season, the Dolphins unveiled the Wildcat to the world and used it to crush the Patriots, 38-13. But in a November contest in Miami, New England was able to snuff out the Wildcat the second time around, holding the Dolphins to 25 yards on eight snaps out of the formation on the way to a 48-28 win.
“They gave us problems last year the first time we played them, and the second time, we [were] able to answer it,” defensive lineman Ty Warren told WEEI on Monday. “I thought the Jets did a good job with them yesterday. Hopefully, we can take a little bit of what hurt us last year, what helped us in that second game and what occurred over the course of the games this past season and try and help us overcome that attack.”
Despite the success the Patriots had last November against the Wildcat — as well as that by the Jets and Saints the last two weeks — New England defensive coordinator Dean Pees cautions people who might think there has been some sort of blueprint created for stopping it.
“I think what you do is, when you’re playing a team, you really kind of focus on just that team,” Pees said on the same conference call. “Now, you also look at teams that they’ve played and the success or lack of success they’ve had playing certain fronts or coverages or techniques. Everybody always looks at what you can try to do to stop that team.
“But watching somebody else’s Wildcat — or any other formation for that matter — can be totally different with two different teams.”
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