Boy did they need that.
Finally the Patriots got a win at Gillette Stadium.
Finally New England blew out a supposedly inferior opponent.
Finally there might be a sliver of hope and reason to believe the optimism that’s been sold by players and coaches alike for weeks in Foxborough.
Sunday’s 54-13 beatdown of the Jets – a team Richard Seymour called New England’s “homecoming” opponent during his halftime Patriots Hall of Fame ceremony – was exactly what the football doctors ordered for Bill Belichick’s team that had seemingly been in a bit of a flawed funk for the first six weeks of 2021.
Obviously, it’s just the Jets. And a Jets team that lost rookie starting quarterback Zach Wilson to a knee injury in the second quarter.
But it’s more than the Patriots were able to accomplish the first time around against New York, even with Wilson throwing four picks. It’s way more than New England did in Week 1 against a Dolphins team that still only has that one win on the season. More than came from a trip to Houston for a too-close win over the terrible Texans.
“We all needed that one. Everybody as a collective, all of Pats Nation including us,” Brandon Bolden declared after catching six balls for 79 yards including a 15-yard touchdown.
“I think everybody needed a game like this,” Matt Judon echoed after leading a defense that took the ball away from the Jets three times. “The locker room was happy. I think, honestly, we just needed to win at home. Our first win of the season at home. We just needed to do that. We kind of need to win all our games. We want to win all our games. But a game like this, hopefully it has a snowball effect and everybody can get confidence through a game like this and it carries on through the rest of the season.”
There’s the question. Is Sunday’s well-rounded breakout win a sign of things to come or simply an autumn aberration at home against a terrible opponent?
For one day, it almost doesn’t matter. Believing is easier when you are seeing, right?
It’s also a question that absolutely can’t be answered right now. It’s one for down the road. In L.A. Or against the Browns, Titans and Bills.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You have to crawl before you can walk. To get out of a hole you first need to stop digging. Pick whatever motivational, get-your-ass together cliché you want, the Patriots needed this win that could be a potential first step on the run that internally seems to be almost expected.
“It was great. I think we got a little flavor of if we do everything right throughout the week and practice well and do our job in the game it kind of translates over,” Mac Jones said of his first 300-yard passing day, one that included multiple touchdown passes for the second straight week and third time in four games. “You just play together as a unit, as an offense and then special teams played well, really good, and the defense played good. It’s all three phases. That’s what happens when you do that. I mean we’re not satisfied. We have plenty of games left and we’re excited we finally kind of saw a little bit of our result that was good. We just have to stick to the formula and stick to the process.”
This week, New England now sitting at 3-4 on the season, it feels easier to buy the optimistic narrative about the close losses over the last month plus. That a fumble and a doinked field goal in the rain are the difference between current reality and a 5-2 record that would be good for first place in the AFC East.
It’s at least a little bit more believable to think the Patriots could go on a run in the coming weeks to not only get above .500 but make the final couple months of the season meaningful and interesting, whether they result in a still-unlikely trip to the postseason or not.
While a number of players acknowledged the need for the type of win they got over the Jets and the confidence boost that it might provide, Belichick didn’t necessarily believe in the importance of it beyond the obvious.
“I don’t think we lack confidence,” Belichick said.
OK, Bill, in the present tense that’s true. After demoralizing the Jets rather than settling for some type of moral victory the Patriots are feeling good. Putting up 54 points and 550-plus yards against a division rival tends to do that for a team. But it wasn’t quite as true after last week’s overtime loss to the Cowboys that had Judon noting things had to change swiftly or it would “get ugly real fast.”
They did change. The Patriots destroyed the visiting Jets the way they were supposed to after what was described as a good week of work and practice driven, at least to some degree, by the taste of ongoing, disappointing losing.
Now it’s about using the results against New York as a springboard, as a turning point in the season. To turn the taste of effective, complementary play and victory into consistency and consistent winning.
“We’re confident in the guys in this building. If we keep working hard and doing our jobs and keep moving forward with a positive outlook we really believe we can turn this season around,” Harris said. “This is what we needed. We knew coming into this game we needed to come out on top. Whatever it took we were willing to come in here and do it. We knew the importance of this game. We knew the importance of this week. At the end of the day we just wanted to go 1-0 this week. The past is behind us. At this point our focus is just to go 1-0 every single week.”
Regardless of the opponent, that mentality got off to a near-perfect start against the Jets. How much is that worth?
Let’s reconvene right here in about a week to try to actually answer that question.