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Welcome to the Athletic Football today's friday october first i'm robert maize great show for you guys

today shiel kapati is going to be joining us a little bit later for our week four picks and bring in mind

like we do every single week really enjoyed our conversation with shield Shield. Before that, though, I am thrilled to welcome.

My good friend, Nate Tyson, how you doing, buddy? I love it. I am doing great. I just love how you talk about Shield, like we're going to wheel him out, like a special attraction. We got Shield coming on. Here he is. Like, you know, come on every week. for that no it's i love doing this show especially for slated games that we have on sunday like i'm

fired off Here he is. Like, you know, come on every week. But that, no, it's, I love doing this show, especially for Slate of games that we have on Sunday. Like, I'm fired up to watch so many of these games. It was actually kind of hard to pick what we were going to talk about because there's so many good ones. It was really tough. So obviously, every Friday, we try to pick five things. Sometimes it's a player. Sometimes it's a matchup. We have three just full games here because of how

many games that we wanted to dig into. Before we get into those games, though, I did want to start

with one matchup. The game of the week in a lot of people's minds. Tom Brady going back to New England.

I think that one side of this ball is significantly more interesting than the other. And I think it's the Patriots defense playing against Tom Brady and the Bucks offense. I thought this was a good chance to dig into what New England has been doing defensively this year, how they've been playing. Because I feel like you and I both were excited about this defense coming into the season. They have a lot of town in the front seven.

And so far, they've been pretty good. They're a top 10 unit by DVOA. I think they're eighth right now.

They've really done a great job at limiting explosive plays in the passing game.

So when you went back and you watched them today, what jumped out to you about the way that

they've played over the first few weeks? The first thing is just the personnel groupings they use. First thing is it's so hard to keep track of it is so hard to keep track of who's on the field. Because they move those linebackers everywhere and it's just like, no, no, put him as the mic. No, High Tower's the mic. No no why is he on the ball like you know it's like oh

i know and then like the safeties are all in different places and it's just i'm pretty sure they

played 19 guys on defense against the saints last week wow i'm pretty sure it was 19 guys and not just

like a scatter play here there it's like like Joe Juan Williams is playing a couple plays.

Jaylon Mills is out wide. Then he's in the slot. The linebackers are all over the place.

You have three safeties on the field. Phillips is at linebacker. Docker's at linebacker. It is so hard to get a hold on who's playing where within this defense.

Obviously by design, right? But when you watch an entire game, it's like, holy shit, this is a lot. Yep. It's just annoying because you don't get a beat on it. Like we watched the Chargers and we were talking about it. And I was like, okay, where Durwin James is, I could tell what personnel grouping they are. Like, you know, just like, okay, boom, I could just do it. It's just one guy.

I got one little ad lib guy.

I have to keep track up.

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