For the latest on the Patriots, check out WEEI and Audacy's "1st and Foxborough."
Patriots fans have been here before: expecting their team to knock off a sub-.500 squad with a mobile quarterback who's having a down year.
The last encounter -- a shocking blowout loss to the Chicago Bears on Monday Night Football -- burned New England. Now, it's Kyler Murray who could be looking to the Patriots for a get-right game.
Bill Belichick's defense hasn't performed well against mobile quarterbacks, losing all three of their games so far in 2022 to quarterbacks who rank top five in rushing yards since the start of last year (Justin Fields, Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen).
Enter Murray, who ranks seventh in rushing yards among quarterbacks (415) despite missing two contests this season.
But Murray's overall play has been far below the standards he's set thanks to injuries both to himself and his offensive line. That's a long way from what he was last season when he looked like a top-10 player at the position, says Tyler Vazquez of Audacy's "Kickoff in the Valley" podcast.
"Last year before that Green Bay game [in Week 8], Kyler was a front-runner for the MVP through almost half the season. He's not been the same since then," Vazquez told the "1st and Foxborough" podcast Friday. "It's just been really bad football games from him. You look at that playoff game against the Rams last year where they just got blown out, and Kyler threw some weird interceptions and just it was just ugly. That's the guy we've been getting all season. We haven't been getting the Kyler of old, and that's what suits well for the Patriots on Monday."
Heading into that Packers game last season, the Cardinals were 7-0 and looking like one of the best teams in football.
That 24-21 loss, in which Murray's potential game-winning pass intended for an unsuspecting A.J. Green got intercepted in the waning seconds, led to a downward spiral for the quarterback and the Cardinals as a whole. The team went 4-5 over their final nine games and lost control of the division to the eventual Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams, who destroyed the Cardinals in the Wildcard Round.
So far in 2022, Murray ranks 33rd in average depth of target (7.2) -- even lower than Mac Jones' mark of 7.7 -- which takes away one of his top skills (downfield passing) despite having DeAndre Hopkins and Marquise Brown to throw to.
Murray's also one of the worst passers in the league against pressure and has seen a small downturn in his designed carries due to his health.
The speedy quarterback has all the support on the outside needed to bother the Patriots and still has more than enough speed to torture this defense if it loses its discipline. But the threat of Murray might not be as great at the moment as fear makes it -- or so we hope.