While the Patriots blew out the Redskins, 33-7 Sunday afternoon in Washington to improve to 5-0 on the year, things didn't get off to the best of starts.
The Patriots only led 12-7 at halftime and the Redskins actually led 7-0, which was the first time New England has trailed all season.
On the Redskins' second drive of the game, Steven Simms scored a touchdown on a 65-yard run, which was really due to poor tackling by the Patriots defense. A number of players had a chance to bring him down, but took poor angles allowing him to run up the sideline for the score.
After that play, the Patriots defense allowed no points and just 155 yards of total offense.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, Bill Belichick praised the unit for bouncing back.
"It happened early, obviously a bad play," he said. "We certainly could coach it better, we could play it better. They did, they bounced right back and kind of had a high level of determination to execute better and like I said, we fixed a couple of things. The Redskins used a lot of 10 personnel — a lot of four receivers. They were down a tight end so we anticipated some of that, but not as much as they did."
Devin McCourty had similar thoughts, including acknowledging it shouldn't have gone for such a big gain.
"We had one bad play defensively, where obviously it was a good play call, but it came down to I think it should have been a 15, 18-yard gain and we should have just tackled it, gone to the sideline and talked about it," he said. "I thought we did a good job of getting to the sideline and realizing it was one play and continue to play good defense from that point out. A play here and there is going to happen, but I thought we did a good job just adjusting. They had some injuries, so they came out and we saw a lot of four wide receiver sets and different things with Simms being able to counter plays as a running back type of plays.
"I thought we did a good job adjusting to that and just playing good football from there on out."
Through five games the Patriots have allowed just 34 points and are on pace to allow just 109 points, which would be a NFL record. By way of comparison, the 2000 Ravens allowed a record-low 165 points for the season and through five games they allowed 55 points.
