NFL

"The Patriots would literally tell him to run a route a certain way, and a minute later he would run it the other way," wrote the Globe's Greg Bedard. "It happened all the time." During recent OTAs, he also struggled to recognize zone versus man coverage. Even if it irked Carson Palmer, Ochocinco often got away with freelancing as opposed to running the correct route in Cincinnati. That was never going to work in the Patriots' precision timing offense, which relies on receivers to make pre-snap reads and run exactly where Tom Brady expects them to run.