Sometime Sunday night, Josh McDaniels will pace the Patriots‘ sideline peering over a laminated play sheet he’ll holds just below his eyes.

McDaniels’ stare will cast over the field, as he mutters a big number into his headset.

That number will be part of a lengthy play-call, with other numbers, letters and code words that say everything McDaniels wants from the next play. But the big number will speak loudest.

First, it will tell a little-known offensive lineman to take the field. That lineman, 6-foot-6, 331-pound Thayer Munford Jr., is largest piece of a small reason the Patriots are hosting a Wild Card playoff game instead of hitting the road on another march back toward the Super Bowl. The big number is his jersey number: No. 74.

Munford will then join the huddle, one that now consists of six offensive linemen. His presence means the Patriots are playing through some type of jumbo personnel, a beefy grouping that makes a head referee announce before the play one lineman is allowed to catch the ball as an eligible receiver. But if Munford were to introduce himself, he might say something else.

“I’m here to run somebody over,” he told the Herald.

According to Sports Info. Solutions, the Patriots have played more than 22% of their offensive snaps in jumbo personnel since their Week 14 bye, a massive jump from the 2.8% they had played to that point in the season. Most of these plays have been runs, an obviously effort by the coaching staff to revive their rushing attack, which for most of the season plodded along, almost lifeless.

How lifeless? Try ranking third-worst in the NFL by success rate and Expected Points Added (EPA) through 14 weeks.

But since then, it’s roared back to life; Lazarus walking out of the tomb with a lowered shoulder and bad intentions.

The Patriots posted the second-most rushing yards in the NFL over the last four weeks of the regular season and averaged more yards and first downs per carry than the rest of the league. First, they bowled over Buffalo for 246 yards. Last Sunday, they obliterated an above-average Miami run defense for 243 yards in their season finale. In between, they cracked a top-10 Ravens run defense with a long, game-winning touchdown in the fourth quarter.

That run, a 21-yard Rhamondre Stevenson special, started with Munford taking the field for a snap of jumbo personnel. Stevenson later ripped off runs of 35 and 56 yards out of jumbo against the Dolphins. Overall, the Pats have averaged 8.3 yards per rush behind an extra offensive lineman during the stretch, pounding out a stellar success rate and seven touchdowns against a variety of defenses.

“It’s physics,” said Patriots fullback Jack Westover. “You get a guy like (Munford) coming at you, there’s not a whole lot a linebacker can do in that situation.”

This Friday, Mike Vrabel revealed that a few teams inspired the Patriots’ jumbo shift during their bye. Upon a quick glance, two obvious candidates emerge: the Steelers and Texans. In Pittsburgh, Vrabel’s former offensive coordinator, Arthur Smith, has called the second-most plays in the league with six offensive linemen, while Houston has resurrected its own run game working around its punchless offensive line. How?

By calling the most plays with six offensive linemen of any NFL offense, a whopping 200 on the season. Texans offensive coordinator Nick Caley is a former Patriots assistant whose system is similar enough to the offense still run in New England. Copying and pasting from either team’s tape should have been easy, especially knowing the risk of entering the playoffs without a threatening run game.

“You’d better be able to (run the ball) in the tournament,” Vrabel said last week.

New England Patriots running back Rhamondre Stevenson runs up field during the third quarter of Sunday’s win over the Dolphins at Gillette Stadium. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

According to SumerSports, the use of jumbo personnel is up almost 100% across the league year-over-year. Led by the Texans and Steelers, NFL offenses called 1,810 plays with an extra offensive lineman this season compared to 986 last year. Yet the Patriots didn’t need to look around to find answers so much as look at their own history.

Seven years ago, McDaniels shifted the Patriots’ offensive identity toward a more run-centric approach weeks before the playoffs. The Pats’ hope was a re-powered run game would offset some recent passing struggles, and pad their armor for the postseason, where offensive balance and hard-nosed defense are king.

Their first step back to the Super Bowl was bulldozing the Chargers, who visited in the divisional round and left with cleat marks on their backs after Sony Michel rushed for 129 yards and three touchdowns. Michel’s performance came three weeks after he rumbled to 116 rushing yards and a touchdown in a run-happy, regular-season win over Buffalo,.

The Pats eventually lifted their sixth Lombardi trophy thanks a 13-3 triumph over the Rams in the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever, where Michel punched in the game’s only touchdown. Before and after the game, Rams defenders and defensive coordinator Wade Phillips explained that stopping the Patriots’ run game had been their chief focus of their game plan.

That’s right. The key to stopping that Tom Brady-led offense, as the Rams saw it, was to force the ball into Brady’s hands. And for the most part, having allowed only 13 measly points and one red-zone trip, the Rams weren’t wrong.

So as Drake Maye powers the Patriots’ offense back to the playoffs, and, frankly, carries most of their team, the coaching staff know run-pass balance must pave any path back to the Super Bowl. That means taking more off their MVP’s plate, and handing it to his offensive line.

“This is what we want to be,” Munford said of the jumbo runs, “and this is how we want to be.”

New England Patriots offensive tackle Thayer Munford Jr. (74) in action during the first half of an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Terrance Williams)

Yet the beauty of the Patriots’ jumbo pivot is arguably the balance they’ve struck by diversifying their personnel and Munford’s role within these packages. McDaniels isn’t simply calling goal-line offense all over the field and treating Munford as an extra, stationary blocker.

Occasionally, McDaniels will weaponize him as the lone tight end in three-receiver sets and send Munford in motion. He’ll even use Munford as a fullback. He’ll deploy him as the second tight end in two-tight end packages; wrinkles that strengthen the Patriots’ run-blocking if they want to run without sacrificing much passing potential if they instead choose to throw.

Munford’s experience in Las Vegas, where McDaniels first met and drafted him in 2022, has unlocked his potential as a movable piece that by extension has unlocked a new dimension for the whole offense.

“My first two years there, all I did was strictly jumbo. Just jumbo tight end,” Munford said of his time in Las Vegas. “But since (McDaniels) trusts me a lot more now, (I’m) the tight end or fullback to help out the team as best possible, and help out this identity of we’re tough, and we’re about to run it down your throat.”

That is, most of the time. Because if defenses load up near the line of scrimmage to stop the run, like when Munford is the second tight end in snaps of heavy personnel, that makes them more predictable in coverage, which to the Patriots makes them vulnerable.

“You know what type of (defensive) looks you’re gonna get out of those types of situations,” Westover said. “It’s a lot of the most common looks because teams aren’t gonna have a huge play sheet for a jumbo. They’re gonna do a few things, and having dependable looks you can go against, that helps.”

Which brings us back to the Chargers.

This week, McDaniels said they can disguise complex coverage as well as any defense in football. Come third down, where the Chargers ranked top-5 this season, it’s anyone’s guess, even for the best quarterbacks in the league.

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“Very few repeated looks,” McDaniels said. “They’re going to challenge your ability to identify where they’re at. They’re a team that will send guys — anybody could blitz in certain situations. They’ll challenge your eye discipline, your rules and then your ability to, once you identify (the coverage), then it’s, ‘Are you tough enough to stand in there and slug it out?’ That is not going to be a small thing on Sunday night.”

But what if the Patriots turned that around?

What if they forced the Chargers to ask whether they’re tough enough to slug it out against McDaniels’ jumbo pacakges? To hang in, down after down, blow after blow, and not break as Baltimore did late or early and often like Buffalo and Miami?

If the answer is still yes, McDaniels still has one card left to play.

In his 54 snaps as a tight end or fullback this season, Munford has blocked 54 times. Never once has he run a route as an eligible receiver. That play is nowhere on the Patriots’ tape.

But it is in McDaniels’ playbook.

And should Munford slip out Sunday night near the goal line, the ball could find him for a touchdown in the Patriots’ biggest game in years. Then everyone will see, as sure as the ball leaves Maye’s hands and lands in Munford’s, how the identity this offense traveled the same distance so the Patriots might play another big game next weekend, the weekend after that and maybe even beyond.

Quote of the Week

“When you come into a new situation and there’s things that are happening with players outside of here, it’s hard to get to know them. And I think that was the first thing, is just trying to support him from afar without really knowing him. There were days where he wouldn’t communicate, and there were days that he would. We would try to just keep reaching out to him and support him the best that we could. And then, when he was able to come in, I’ve enjoyed every minute that I’ve had to spend with him as a person and as a player.” — Mike Vrabel on supporting Patriots running back Rhamondre Stevenson through the passing of his father this past spring and during the season