FOXBORO, Mass. — The New England Patriots did basically everything they wanted on Sunday afternoon. They’ve made their formula for success this season well known: Play good defense, don’t turn the ball over, run it well and dominate time of possession. They did all of those things against the Seattle Seahawks.
And they still lost.
The Patriots were up three points with five minutes left and had the ball in field goal range. And they still lost.
This season isn’t one that’s going to be defined by wins and losses, but this was still a tough loss to swallow, a 23-20 defeat in overtime in their home opener.
The positive outlook for New England is simple. This team was supposed to be terrible, and it’s not. Through two games, this has proven to be a competitive, tough, physical group. It looks like coach Jerod Mayo is building something. In a lot of ways, it feels like 2000 again in these parts, when Bill Belichick was setting the cornerstones of a competitive team even if the results weren’t there right away.
But this game also revealed the hard truth about the way these Patriots are trying to win, forced to try and thread a needle and win on the fringes because of the general lack of talent on the roster. Even when they do everything they want, these games are still 50-50 propositions because the offense lacks explosiveness behind a middling pass attack and a struggling group of wide receivers.
“Look, this isn’t a fancy football team,” Mayo said.
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Put another way, this team doesn’t have the speed and weapons — now seemingly required to win in the NFL — to quickly turn around a game. Every yard for this team is hard-fought.
That’s part of why the Patriots offense was so boom or bust on Sunday. Even if they had some impressive possessions (including their go-ahead touchdown drive in the fourth quarter), more than half of their 11 possessions resulted in three-and-outs. Their final nine offensive plays resulted in 11 total yards. They averaged 4.7 yards per play, basically the same output as the 4.6 yards produced by last year’s dreadful unit. Quarterback Jacoby Brissett threw for just 149 yards on Sunday, one week after throwing for 121 (in a win!).
On the other hand, the Pats ran for 185 yards on Sunday against the Seahawks. In their Week 1 victory over the Cincinnati Bengals, they ran for 170.
GIBSON GETTING AWAYYY 🏃💨
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When your offense is that one-dimensional, it will be hard to win games even when you run it well and play good defense and show toughness and control the clock and all of the things that Mayo often talks about.
“We’ve got to start pushing the ball down the field,” Mayo said. “It’s something that we need to work on. That’s what I would say.”
But here’s where the Patriots roster is especially limited. The wide receivers are bad enough that offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt can’t seem to get them involved even when Brissett is evading rushers behind a line that’s struggling to pass block.
The New England wide receivers caught three passes for 19 yards Sunday. They were targeted just five times on 27 passes. In Week 1, Pats receivers combined for just eight catches.
Of course, the Patriots foresaw this issue. That’s why they tried so hard to land Calvin Ridley and Brandon Aiyuk. That’s why their quest for a No. 1 receiver should be the top priority next offseason.
“Obviously we would like more in our passing game,” Brissett said. “I’ve got to do a better job of getting a lot of those guys involved in the game plan and throughout the game. I take responsibility for that.”
It’s too late now for Eliot Wolf to do much to improve the Patriots’ passing offense, so the task falls to Van Pelt and the coaching staff. The easy answer would be to insert rookie quarterback Drake Maye, since he’d likely be an automatic boost to the passing game. But that’s not in the cards anytime soon, as the Patriots want him to learn behind Brissett.
So they march on with this plan of trying to win games with little margin for error, even as a tough two-game stretch looms with back-to-back trips to the New York Jets and San Francisco 49ers.
Yet it’s still producing a much more watchable product than many anticipated before the season when the Patriots were given one of the lowest projected win totals of any team. Though it’s still early, the disaster this season could’ve been doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
That’s where the parallels exist to 2000 and a young coach named Belichick. Play smart, build a culture, run the ball.
The Patriots are doing that even if there’s plenty to squabble about, like Brissett taking an ill-advised sack, which bumped the Patriots back to a 48-yard field goal try, which was blocked, which gave the Seahawks a short field, which led to the game-tying kick. And then when the Patriots got the ball first in overtime, they couldn’t do anything with it, going three-and-out for the fifth time in their final seven drives.
“It was just a bad play by me,” Brissett said of the sack. “I was trying to get the ball out, and I just didn’t want to be careless with the ball and somebody strip-sack me from behind because I felt somebody coming from behind.”
It’s also inexcusable that the Patriots have done such a poor job of putting the ball in Demario Douglas’ hands. He led last year’s team in receiving as a rookie, then was easily the team’s most dynamic receiver in training camp. Through two games, Douglas has three targets, which have turned into two catches for 12 yards. (Amazingly, he’s still only 16 yards behind K.J. Osborn for the team lead among receivers.)
Until the Patriots figure out how to get the passing game going in a bigger way, they can pretty much do everything they want — and still lose.
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(Photo of Jacoby Brissett: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
