Position coaches are the single biggest differentiator from a personnel standpoint that fans and the media rarely, if ever, talk about even though pretty much any former player would swear it to be true.

It’s the position coaches that are charged with making sure the men that sit in their meeting room every day are well prepared to play as a cohesive unit when it matters the most.

You rarely hear about them. Even in the month of January, as new coaches fill out their staffs, the guys that get hired to coach each position are an afterthought at best.

People care a great deal about the head coach, obviously. Potential coordinator hires are bandied about ad nauseam on talk radio until those decisions are made.

But position coaches? Almost never.

Yet here we are, fresh off the conference championship games, and one of the biggest stars of Sunday’s action was a former Marine who isn’t close to 5’10” and never played a down in the NFL: Patriots offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. In back to back games against teams with multiple elite rushers Tom Brady was sacked a whopping zero times. 81 drop backs, zero sacks. Heck, he was only even hit two times total by the likes of Melvin Ingram, Joey Bosa, Justin Houston, Dee Ford, and Chris Jones.

Does Tom Brady deserve some of the credit there? Of course. There’s never been anyone better in terms of pocket movement and getting rid of the ball quickly. It’s as big of a reason for his preposterous success as anything else.

But he’s not that good that he can do it all by himself. The guys up front still need to get the job done and this year’s edition of the Patriots offensive line has taken their game to another level recently.

It’s not even just their impeccable pass protection. New England also ran the ball for 174 yards on Sunday in Kansas City in one of the most hostile environments in the NFL. Of the 94 snaps they had in the game, only one went for negative yardage: Brady’s kneel down at the end of regulation to take the game into overtime.

Trent Brown, Joe Thuney, David Andrews, Shaq Mason, and Marcus Cannon all deserve a ton of credit, but the truth is this is a textbook example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts as only Mason is really an All-Pro caliber candidate. That’s pretty much how it always is in New England under Scarnecchia.

I had nine offensive line coaches during my time in the NFL and that included big names in the offensive line world like Jim McNally and Joe Bugel, yet nobody ever got more out of their players than the guy affectionately known as “Scar.”

There are a lot of reasons for this but the biggest by far is how demanding he was in general and especially when it came to attention to detail.

It started with individual period which is typically at the start of practice and is the biggest window of time in which a position coach can work with his charges in any way he’d like. For Scar, that meant running — and lots of it. We would work on our zone footwork left and right, sprinting ten yards off the football over and over and over again up and down the field.  He was the seventh of the nine coaches I ended up working with and by far the most strenuous in that regard as there were times I thought I might puke.

It really served three purposes. Number one, our zone footwork became outstanding. Number two, we were in outstanding physical shape in terms of conditioning. And number three, in part because of number two, we were very mentally tough.

Some of the coaches who I played for gave the offensive line a rest period while the team practiced special teams. Not Scar. In fact, that was often the time when we practiced our timing on screens with the quarterbacks and running backs which means it was the exact opposite of a rest period: more running.

Why do you think the Patriots seem to be the best screen team in the NFL year after year? It’s not an accident.

“You don’t get a great appreciation for OL coaches because they like to be behind the scenes,” former Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis told me. “Dante has done a wonderful job and really solidified that group.”

Has he ever. It was only three years ago that Brady got bruised and battered in the AFC Championship Game in Denver. Shortly thereafter, the offensive line coach was fired, Scarnecchia was talked out of retirement, and the Patriots haven’t missed a Super Bowl since.

It’s not just Scarnecchia and it’s not just offensive line coaches. I’ve seen countless examples where a team making a change at running back coach had a profound impact on the team, especially as it related to their ability to pick up the blitz.

Position coaches matter. A lot. And the sooner your organization can figure that out the sooner they’ll have a better chance at sustained success.

Trust me.

And if you don’t trust me, just trust the Patriots