Frank Reich vs. Bill Belichick, Mac Jones

2. The Frank Reich vs. Bill Belichick chess match.

The Colts – like every team in the NFL – knows what Bill Belichick’s goal is: If you fight right-handed, he’ll make you beat his team left-handed.

“I remember Belichick always used to say, they’re going to have to beat us left-handed,” longtime Patriots and Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri said on this week’s Colts Official Podcast. “So I’m going to take your best players away and I you can find a way to still beat us, well, great.” 

The assumption, then, would be Belichick will try to take away the thing the Colts have had the most success with in 2021, which is handing the ball off to Taylor – who leads the NFL in rushing by a wide margin (he has 312 more yards than Joe Mixon, who’s second in rushing).

“Really one of the top backs in the league, if not the top back,” Belichick said in a video on Patriots.com this week. “He’s having a great year. He’s going to be a problem to stop.” 

But what does playing left-handed look like for the Colts’ offense? Is it leaning on Carson Wentz to attack the Patriots through the air? Is it giving Nyheim Hines more touches? Is it finding different ways to get Taylor the ball?

Or could the Colts – with one of the best offenses in the NFL – still be able to play right-handed?

“I think it’s a combination of always having your core stuff ready – having some things in our back pocket, knowing the different ways that he might try to attack us,” head coach Frank Reich said. “That’s unpredictable to some extent. It probably is helpful to us that it is later in the year so that we have a lot of accumulated reps on offense so if we need to make adjustments in the course of a game, we can go to things that we’ve run and have a lot of accumulated reps on.”

The Colts do have 13 games of figuring out what run and pass concepts work against certain coverage looks, which should help Reich, Wentz, Taylor, etc. find answers throughout the game. But just because there’s an answer in the first quarter doesn’t necessarily mean that’ll still work in the fourth quarter. Saturday night is shaping up to be a full-on, 60-minute slugfest.

And it’s one the Colts feel well-prepared for. Remember: It’s not just the Patriots that are playing well coming into this game. The Colts are, too.

“You have to be willing to consider, what are you going to do to adapt to the way they’re going to play you,” Reich said. “That’s a big, philosophical question that you have to ask at the beginning of the week, and to what extend are you willing to change certain things. And like most times, it’s we’re going to change some but we’re not going to change everything. We’re going to mix it up, we’re going to do whatever it takes. We believe we have the players that can do that and can compete on all levels. So that’s the give and take during the week.”