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This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays, and I am thrilled to be joined today by my good friend

Bill Barnewell. Bill, how are you doing, buddy? Bill Barnwell vspn. Sorry, I just assume people know.

I appreciate that you've been doing podcasts with me for what, a decade now, close to a decade now?

It's close to that. And you still can't come up with a new intro besides the exact cadence and the exact like five-word intro you do for every podcast. So the way that I've described it as I was talking to the producers before we started developing the show was that it's like Zoolander not being able to turn left. I can only do it one way. And every other time I consider a different way to do it, I just start tripping all over myself. I'm not a versatile podcast introducer. It's just not something I have in my toolbox. Maybe one day we can hope that you find another way to get into talking about football, division by division. It's a very difficult task, so I understand why it'd be tough for you. I don't. I think that that has passed.

I think if it was going to happen, it already would have happened. As Bill alluded to, we have done this together, you know, at old stops. We did the Grantland NFL podcast together for years. Bill is still at ESPN. He is one of my favorite people to talk about football with. He is a must read constantly on the NFL. I have no idea how he has the bandwidth to write in a podcast as much as he does about the league, but he is constantly churning out great information. And I could not think of a better person to include in these division previews than him. We are doing the AFC East today, and there is no shortage of topics to talk about. We're going to start today, Bill, with the New England Patriots, because even if they are not the favorite in some people's minds to win this division, I do think that they are the team we have to start with just when you consider the history. They've dominated this division for as long as I've been watching the NFL, it seems. But obviously, it's a different year. It's a different animal. No Tom Brady.

Cam Newton comes in. A ton of turnover outside of the Tom Brady situation. So there's a lot of stuff to get to. This team is going to look a lot different than it did last year. So I think the

number one question off the top here, it seems like Cam Newton is going to win this quarterback

battle as most sentient beings thought he would after the Patriot

signed him this spring. What do you think this offense will look like under Cam Newton if they're just

kind of building it from scratch? Okay. So I think it's not as much as it is about the personnel

usage or the scheme. Like I don't think they're going to run the single wing, you know, with Cam as quarterback. I wouldn't put it past them. They might run it for a player, too. Like, he may see some concepts. But I think sort of the thing I keep coming back to with Cam is that he's a replacement, not just for Tom Brady, but also for Rob Grankowski. And that sounds weird. He's not going to play tight end, but I'm going to explain why that is the case.

So in years past, one of the things the Patriots did really, really well was that they would take advantage of whatever they sent out, or whatever the opposing team sent out in terms of their defensive personnel grouping.

So the Patriots would dictate that with their own personnel groupings. They would come out with three, four wide, spread you out, and they could run the football very effectively because they had a good offensive line, and they had gronk. And when they came out, they won a Super Bowl against the Rams by running, you know, this sort of concept three times in a row.

They came out with... It was that empty package where they'd come out and essentially spread you out and kind of dictate one-on-one patch of which works for them very well in all. Right. And then the flip side of that is you come out with two running backs, you come out with a fullback and James Devlin in the years past. You come out with two tight ends and you throw the football. And they were able to do that effectively against the ramps in that game.

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