Josh McDaniels just reminded everyone why he's one of the league's best offensive minds, and it has nothing to do with the Raiders winning or losing. Before halftime against a tough defensive front, McDaniels dialed up a 26-yard tight end screen to Hunter Henry—and it worked precisely because he'd spent the entire drive setting it up. That's not luck. That's scheme.
Here's what matters: McDaniels had been calling constant tight end chips against Maxx Crosby all drive long, positioning Henry to block down-field repeatedly on that side of the field. By the time the screen call came, Crosby was conditioned. The formation and motion created additional confusion. When the ball came out to Henry in space, the defense was already leaning the wrong way. This is football at a higher level—using repetition and constraint plays to manufacture explosive opportunities.
For the Patriots, watching this tape should spark a conversation. We've got Hunter Henry on our roster. We've got the personnel to execute this type of orchestrated play-calling. The question isn't whether we can copy it—it's whether we're thinking about offensive design with this level of intentionality. Mike Vrabel and Eliot Wolf have both worked in systems that valued this kind of meticulous preparation, and if there's a silver lining to being outside the playoff picture early, it's having time to build these concepts into the foundation.
The screen itself is almost secondary to the lesson. McDaniels proved that pre-snap work—the chips, the motion, the formation tendencies—creates the conditions for explosive plays to happen naturally. It's the difference between hoping a play works and engineering it to work. That's the kind of offensive philosophy that wins close games and keeps defenses off-balance for 60 minutes.