Tom E. Curran • E-mail

The New England Patriots went 16-0 during the 2007 regular season. The Miami Dolphins went 1-15.

So when the two teams met in the Week 3 of the 2008 season, Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano and his staff figured it might be smart to bring along some brass knuckles. Which they did in the form of the single-wing “Wildcat offense.”

New England, totally unprepared for the confusing, throwback attack, got run over, 38-13. The win gave the Dolphins a jolt and helped spur them to an 11-5 record. And suddenly, NFL defensive coordinators were spending time on a series of offensive plays that had been in mothballs for decades.

The element of surprise made all the difference. But how surprised was Sparano that it actually worked, given that he hadn’t used it previous to that game.

“(We were) not real confident at the time, we just had some practice stuff to go on,” Sparano acknowledged this August. “We had gone into it really thinking it would be one or two plays in that New England game. We were just going to kind of see how it (went), how they adjusted. Once we started to see the adjustments people were making to us that is where the thing snowballed.”

Every preseason, teams face an interesting dilemma. They need to practice plays and schemes against live competition to see if they’ll, you know, actually work. But they don’t want to tip their hands too much in games that don’t count.

“It’s a balancing act,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick said. “If you run a play that’s a good or unique play, it could easily be successful in a preseason game because (the opponent) isn’t ready for it and might have a bunch of inexperienced players out there who don’t know how to deal with it. So what do you get out of that?

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“But a lot of teams will onside kick, fake punt, try a fake field goal in the preseason just to get early (regular-season) opponents to think about that. Sometimes it’s to let everybody know, ‘Hey, we got that. We ran it once, we’ll run it again. You better work on it.”

In the very first game of the 2009 season, the Hall of Fame Game between the Bills and Titans, Tennessee ran a fake punt reverse that went for a touchdown. It worked to perfection. Of course, Titans coach Jeff Fisher said at the time he hadn’t run it for a dozen seasons.

“It’s one of those plays you can’t run every year (or) every other year,” Fisher explained. “Once you see the formation and that type of motion then people adjust to it. Enough time had gone by where I felt like it was going to be successful.”

But to what end? If the Titans won’t use it again until 2021 (by which time Fisher will be in his 27th season at the helm), why do it during a meaningless preseason game?

“Well there is a great deal of thought that goes into that,” said Fisher. “You have two extremes. One is show them everything, make your early opponents prepare for everything. The other extreme is don’t show them anything. There are reasons for each and everything we do. We just don’t randomly put plans together and let them do it. There’s a great deal of thought that goes into what we’re doing on both sides of the ball and special teams.”

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And it can be hard for a team to get a good sense of whether something will work if they’re just doing it in preseason practice.

“There are things in the offseason you that you think can make you better but you have to be able to go out there and practice,” explained Texans coach Gary Kubiak. “You as a coach have to find the right times to get it done. When it’s just us out there and (practice is closed) to the public and you don’t have to worry about schemes being shared, you don’t worry.”

But when it’s only performed in practice the element of surprise exists for both sides. Will an opponent react with befuddlement, as New England did against the Wildcat?

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