Image courtesy of Texans Wire-USA Today
Houston Texans defensive coordinator Matt Burke was in town in June.
He was at Game 5 at The Garden when the Celtics clinched the 2024 NBA Championship.
That night, Burke celebrated as everyone raised a New England sports fan did. It was the same way he celebrated each championship he saw the Patriots win up until 2003.
In 2004, the guy who grew up in Hudson playing for the Hawks before playing for Dartmouth University got his first NFL job with the Titans. About a month or two prior, the Patriots had eliminated Tennessee in the AFC Divisional round en route to the Super Bowl win over the Panthers.
Burke’s Pats fandom ended with that phone call.
He’s coached in Gillette Stadium plenty of times on the opposing team since then with stops in Tennessee, Detroit, Cincinnati, Miami, Philadelphia, New York (Jets), Arizona and now Houston for the last two seasons.
This one is different though.
Burke is leading arguably the best defense in the NFL and he’s tasked with coming up with a game plan this Sunday that will halt the Pats’ future in rookie Drake Maye’s first start.
It’s quite a spot to be in, but not one Burke’s allowed himself to think about. In fact, if anything, it’s been the opposite.
“Oh, he is?” Burke said with a laugh when talking about Maye starting during a phone interview on Thursday. “But nah man, we don’t think like that. We’re hoping to make him not the next guy. It’s hard in general. There’s a lot of unknowns. It’s about going in and executing our game plan and see what they’re trying to do with him structurally.
“But, we don’t have time to think big picture. That’s your job.”
The fandom was gone long ago, but Burke does appreciate the opportunity to head back to The Commonwealth whenever he can.
“That 2003 Super Bowl, I was still a Pats fan,” he said. “They knocked the Titans out in the playoffs a couple months earlier and then I got hired by Tennessee. I flipped my allegiances then. It was kind of this awakening like, ‘aw man, this is real stuff now. I can’t root for them anymore.’
“I still have a lot of family and friends up there. I still have a lot of ties. I got to go to Game 5 of the Celtics’ clincher. So, I maintain my Celtics loyalty, but the Patriots, it’s hard to feel too much love.”
Burke initially believed he was going to med school after graduating from Dartmouth. But, he took a coaching job at Bridgton Academy in Maine and the rest is history. A GA job at BC followed and then he joined Harvard for one season in 2003. Burke didn’t get to play under the late legend Buddy Teevens while at Dartmouth, but he did coach with one of Teevens’ closest friends, Tim Murphy.
The time at Dartmouth is what truly sparked his coaching fire that’s still burning bright.
“Dartmouth, I thought I was going to go to med school, so I guess you could say I took a little different path,” said Burke chuckling. “My time at Dartmouth was an unbelievable experience. Just from school, football, like…obviously lifelong friends and teammates and stuff. So, it was really the genesis of planting that seed…when I graduated I still was kind of not sure what I wanted to do. But, I took that job at Bridgton Academy just like ‘alright, I’ll coach and teach for a couple years’ and it just snowballed from there.
“I definitely had as good of a college experience as you can have and as good of a college football experience as you can have. The bonds…it’s cool in this profession now. Like, every game, I’ve got Dartmouth buddies kind of all over the country that come to games every year. I get to see people and stuff, so (that time) certainly started it.”
Burke hasn’t been able to think about the unique position he’s in this Sunday because he’s been preparing his defense without any real film on Maye.
So, how exactly are the Texans preparing for the new face of the franchise in Foxborough?
“I think…obviously, structurally (the Patriots’ offense) isn’t going to change,” he said. “They’re not going to change their whole offense, so there’s going to be base layers of what we’re expecting. Then, it’s just more like, ‘ok, what does (Drake) do well within that framework?’ So, maybe they call a little bit more of this vs. what we’ve seen with Jacoby, you know? Or, it’s ‘man, he’s really good at these throws’ and those are showing up more. Our philosophy in general that we always come back to is like, we’ve got to execute our stuff.
“They can run whatever they want. If we’re not on our business and doing what we’re supposed to be doing, it doesn’t matter who is playing quarterback. It’s good and bad. There’s times you can have a whole book on a guy and it don’t matter. Tom Brady played for a long time and you could kind of know some of his mannerisms and it still didn’t matter. So, there’s unknowns all the time. We’re preaching ‘hey, don’t get caught up in all that stuff, let’s just play what we see.’ Execute our defense and see how that plays out.”
While there isn’t much preseason film on Maye, Burke did note that there are still some things they might be able to take from Maye’s UNC film and some 2023 Browns tape.
“Yeah, we’ll go back and watch that, Not necessarily that the plays are the same, but more for his mechanics, where he likes to escape, what throws he likes to make or what he’s good at throwing, like, how will they tie that in?” he added. “Van Pelt was in Cleveland, we played them twice last season obviously towards the end of the year. So, from a Cleveland standpoint, how did they try to attack our defense? Going back and trying to almost cross reference.
“What did he do well at North Carolina? What’s in that system that fits what he does well that they’ve also liked against us? It’s a little triangulation of what (Maye) does well, what they liked against this scheme and this front (in Van Pelt’s system) last year and this year having played the Jets and the Niners, it’s trying to parse out a little bit of what we’re anticipating.”
In a couple weeks, Burke will be cheering on the Celtics from Houston after they raise banner No. 18 like every other New Englander.
This Sunday, he’ll be trying to stop the future of the Patriots for a few hours.