Mike Pettine says Patriots "mysteriously end up with" opponents' playbooks


So maybe it wasn't necessarily Mike Pettine that said this. If you want to trace it back to the source, it was actually Tom Brady!!

Hidden in Greg Bedard's MMQB piece on new Browns head coach and former Jets defensive coordinator, Mike Pettine, is a little bit about the Patriots and playbooks.

Pettine likes to keep things light these days, mainly because he thinks that eventually his playbook will end up in the hands of Bill Belichick. As, apparently, it has before.

MMQB:
The initial playbook itself is actually quite thin, and that’s by design. “I don’t put a lot of graduate-level information in it,” Pettine says. “We know in places like New England, it’s only a matter of time that they somehow mysteriously end up with our playbook.”

Are playbooks really something that should be guarded so secretly? Not really. Apparently Rex Ryan used to give them out like crazy. Tom Brady even had no qualms about telling a Jets player that the Patriots had theirs.

Pettine told a story of how, at Wes Welker’s wedding, Tom Brady bragged a little bit to Jets outside linebackers coach Mike Smith, who was Welker’s college roommate, that the Patriots may or may not have had possession of a couple Jets defensive playbooks.

“It didn’t shock me because Rex would give them out like candy anyway,” Pettine says. “He gave one out to [Alabama coach Nick] Saban and I was like, ‘Don’t you know Saban and Bill [Belichick] are pretty good friends? I have a feeling it’s going to end up in New England.’”

Does having the opponent's playbook really help that much? Not really.

Some simple film study of an opponent can tell you all about an opponent a playbook would. Is there really a difference between having the same information on paper as opposed to having it on video?

The Patriots may have had the Jets playbook, but that hasn't exactly translated to overwhelming offensive success. They've gotten a few blowouts of the Jets in there, but anyone who watches and remembers the Jets-Patriots battles over recent years realizes they are always close and hardfought - mainly because of the Jets defense.

With his story blowing up for the wrong reasons, Bedard took to twitter to clarify things.




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