FOXBORO, Mass. — Jacoby Brissett almost sounded defeated as he tried to explain how this New England Patriots offense continues to look so inept. His unit was the obvious culprit for the team’s latest loss, its fourth straight.
Brissett talked about simply needing to be better, stressing that no one play — or player — is the reason they’ve been so bad.
“There’s no magic thing that we need to do,” the quarterback said. “We’ve just got to play better. We’ve got to execute better. We’ve got to play with good fundamentals better. We’ve got to do all the little things better.”
We can quibble about the details of that statement. (Maybe, for example, the roster and the coaching need to be better, too.) But after watching Brissett lead this offense to another miserable defeat, this one a 15-10 setback to a bad Miami Dolphins team playing its third-string quarterback, there’s no longer any hiding from the fact that this Patriots offense is historically bad. If the Patriots are so dead set on keeping No. 3 pick Drake Maye on the bench in favor of Brissett, they might as well be tanking. Because the offense in its current form is one of the worst we’ve seen in years and is keeping this franchise from winning games on a weekly basis.
New England hasn’t scored more than 20 points all season and hasn’t put up more than 13 in any of their last three games. The Pats are averaging 119 net passing yards per game, by far the worst in the NFL. Since 2010, only three teams have had a worse first five games passing the ball. They are averaging 12.4 points per game. Over the last five years, only two teams have managed fewer than that in the first five weeks: last year’s Patriots (11 points per game) and this Tua Tagovailoa-less Dolphins team that just came to Foxboro and won (they’re averaging 12 points per game).
“We’re making plays,” Brissett insisted. “We’re just shooting ourselves in the foot. We’re going one step forward to go 20 steps back.”
The success of this season was never going to be dictated by wins and losses. It was supposed to be about progress. With Bill Belichick gone, there’s a new regime with a new culture led by coach Jerod Mayo. These new-look Patriots were supposed to play hard and modernize the offense, and the season would be judged by how Drake Maye, their prized rookie quarterback, looked. Instead, he sits on the bench because the new decision-makers don’t trust themselves to coach around the multiple deficiencies they didn’t properly address in the offseason.
A year ago, the Patriots were maddeningly bad. The kind of bad where quarterbacks threw interceptions in the end zone off their back foot, where they had wide receivers running into each other.
So far this year, they’re just boring bad. The kind of bad that fills up stat sheets with penalties, failed third-down conversions and three-and-outs. The kind of bad that leaves you with the league’s worst passing game and a coaching staff that has yet to yield any meaningful answers.
“I think it’s a combination of things,” Mayo said of the offense’s struggles. “It’s not just one person. It’s everyone just going out there and executing.”
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— New England Patriots (@Patriots) October 6, 2024
Normally, it would be easy to call a loss like this one the worst in years. The Patriots lost at home to a third-string quarterback leading the lowest-scoring offense in the league despite leading with five minutes left.
But for these Patriots, there’s so much competition for the worst loss in years. Last season alone, they lost 6-0 at home, they totaled 31 passing yards in a loss to the Trevor Siemian-led Jets and they lost 34-0 to the Saints at home a week after losing 38-3 to the Cowboys. Already this season, they lost 24-3 to a Jets team that looks pedestrian against everyone else.
So where does New England go from here? This has to be close to rock bottom, right? Can it really get worse than having 12 accepted penalties Sunday while again failing to surpass 300 yards of offense? Worse than losing at home to these pitiful Tyler Huntley-led Dolphins?
The truth is it probably can, at least as long as the Pats continue to trot out Brissett. It was the right move this offseason to sign a veteran quarterback to compete with Maye — and to pick someone as selfless as Brissett who’s willing to teach the rookie and not assign blame during losses.
But it’s clear as day now that Brissett isn’t going to do anything in this offense to help the team win. He completed 16 of 34 passes Sunday for 160 yards, and even that low figure was heavily aided by the Dolphins playing off coverage during the final two drives.
The Patriots have wide receivers who are getting open, including rookie Ja’Lynn Polk, whose heel landing out of bounds late in the fourth quarter cemented Sunday’s loss. But even in the micro sense, looking just at that play, if Brissett threw a better ball, it’s an easy score, one where Polk doesn’t have to leap and risk coming down a few inches over the line.
Instead, we’re left considering just how bad this offense has been through five games. (They can thank only the Adam Gase-led 2019 Jets for being worse in most categories through five weeks.) And we’re left again wondering if this will be the week they switch to Maye, their preseason plan be damned.
If not, the painful slog that is watching this offense will roll on to another week with no record safe from a unit that has been historically bad.
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(Photo: Adam Hunger / Getty Images)
