As Wesley Snipes’ iconic character says at the end of “Blade 2”: “Oh, you didn’t think I forgot about you, did you?”
The Patriots’ mess of a quarterback situation shouldn’t distract you from the fact that Bill Belichick’s defense, which had given up a grand total of 15 points in its previous two contests heading into Monday night, yielded up 33 points to one of the NFL’s worst scoring offenses in the Chicago Bears.
New England was supposed to give Justin Fields, who still leads the NFL’s least-productive passing attack, all kinds of hell only to find themselves grasping at air as he flew by them or watching as he calmly hit receivers on third downs over and over again. And unlike the Patriots, the Bears made good on their promises to run the football, gashing Belichick’s crew for a season-worst 243 yards allowed on the ground.
Fields accounted for 82 of those rushing yards, along with a touchdown, routinely escaping the pocket and creating something out of nothing, which was the one thing New England could not let him do.
In the brief year-plus I’ve covered the Patriots, only two other quarterbacks have seemingly frustrated every effort to contain them and handled the Patriots’ with such ease: Josh Allen (twice last year) and Lamar Jackson.
Fields is not remotely the caliber of player those two are yet, and both Allen and Jackson have far better weapons and can sling it with the best of them. But the second-year quarterback shares a very key quality with them: the ability to run the football, both on scrambles and designed, and extend plays with his legs.
Here’s an interesting stat: the Patriots lead the league in rushing yards allowed to quarterbacks this season (207), according to The 33rd Team, and the totals allowed to Fields and Jackson alone (189) would tie the Miami Dolphins for third-most rushing yards for quarterbacks.
So it’s not as if every quarterback in the league is doing a number on New England via the ground. It’s just a very specific type.
Unfortunately, the best quarterback in the AFC East (Allen) and many another upcoming passer (like Jalen Hurts) seem to embody that playmaker skill set more and more these days, which could signal some trouble for New England.
The Patriots have already lost games against Jackson and Fields, who rank first and fourth, respectively, in quarterback rushing yards since the beginning of last season. (Jackson has 1,277 yards on the ground since the start of 2021, and Fields has 784.) The team will play the third- and fifth-ranked men on that list — Allen (1,020 yards) and Kyler Murray (686) — later this year.
In non-Allen/Jackson/Fields games since 2021 started, the Patriots are 12-8 and have allowed just 15.7 points per game. In the four regular-season games against those three players, including the snow-globe game in Buffalo last year, New England is 1-3, has served up 28.25 points per contest and posted their three worst defensive grades of the last two years. And let’s not even talk about the playoff game…
To put it simply: if you’re just going to sit back in the pocket and try to beat the Patriots that way, they appear to have a good plan for that. When they have to chase you around outside the pocket or see you coming downhill at them out of the backfield, it’s trouble.
Something about the way the running quarterbacks flip the numbers advantages at the line of scrimmage or challenge the conventional wisdom of how Belichick’s teams defend quarterbacks (or both) flummoxes the Patriots every time, and it will bear watching when New England has to play Murray and Allen, who both run effectively in entirely different ways, down the stretch.
Watching Fields do what he did to New England in the midst of an up-and-down season — and the way Chicago openly admitted to stealing plays from Jackson and the Ravens to attack the Patriots — suggests a pattern. You’re not seeing quarterbacks like Jacoby Brissett, Jared Goff or even Aaron Rodgers make the Patriots look like they have no answers for anything they’re doing and couldn’t find one if they tried.
They’d better make some adjustments quick. The Patriots’ quarterback situation isn’t going to matter if the defense keeps getting gashed every which way by the other team’s guy.