What's up everybody?

Welcome into the NextPats podcast.

I'm Phil Perry, a pot-per-y kind of episode for you today here on Nextpats. We, of course, will be talking about some of the Patriots younger players, but I also want to take a little bit of a big picture look at what's happening with the coaching situation as well by looking back, usually on this year podcast. We're looking ahead, but we're going to look back in order to look ahead. I promise it'll all make sense. It's a great episode. We're also going to hear from you.

We've got some mailbag questions to get to. But first, I want to start with something that I heard

this week from my good friend and yours, Matt Castle. Matt Castle was a quarterback on the

2005 iteration of the New England Patriots, and that is relevant to this year's team because 2005 was the last time, in my opinion, when the Patriots were really in a spot similar to the one they're in now with their Patriots offensive play calling responsibilities.

2005 was the first year the Patriots got after it without Charlie Weiss.

Charlie Weiss had moved on, become a head coach himself.

And the Patriots had a relatively unknown offensive assistant, Josh McDaniels, take on what

became essentially the de facto offensive coordinator role. Now, what's

interesting about what happened in 2005 is that there was a lot of secrecy around what exactly

Josh McDaniels was doing and how the offense was going to operate, who was going to be calling

plays, a lot of these same questions that we have here today in 2022.

And so I made sure to reach out to Castle and just ask him about how that operation functioned because you can go back and you can find stories from 05 and see that even

late into that season, it looked like, at least from what I could gather and what I was able to read,

that even reporters weren't entirely sure who was calling the offensive plays during that

season. Of course, when the Patriots would be asked about it, they would be a little bit dodgy,

whether it was McDaniels or Bill Belichick. You know, McDaniels would say things like

Bill Belichick is responsible for what gets called offensively, which seems like a nice little way of getting around the fact that he actually was the one specifically calling the plays, which he was, you know, because Bill Belichick's responsible for everything.

So that makes sense.

And it's a good way to get around that.

We know Bill Belichick oftentimes likes to give his assistance the sort of nebulous or he likes to at least withhold

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