Happy Halloween! The Patriots treated their fans – including a large, vocal contingent on hand at SoFi Stadium – to their best, most impactful performance of the season with a 27-24 hard-fought victory over the Chargers Sunday afternoon.
It wasn’t a win against a rookie quarterback.
It didn’t come versus some one-win squad battling for the top pick in spring’s draft.
It triumphantly came against a Los Angeles team that was fresh off its bye week, came in with a 4-2 record built on an impressive early-season resume via the rocket right arm of rising star QB Justin Herbert and was looking to avenge a 45-0 beatdown by New England less than a year ago on the same turf.
This was a real, honest to goodness impressive win. Not even the most hateful of haters could dispute that.
It was both a Halloween treat for Patriots fans and scary warning for New England’s foes and future competition.
Bill Belichick’s now 4-4 team is indeed seemingly hitting its midseason stride. It’s no longer living off moral victories and lamenting what coulda, shoulda or mighta been.
They won a blowout against a bad team, dismissing the Jets 54-13 last weekend at Gillette the way they were supposedly supposed to.
Now, they went on the road and beat a good team, the way that not too many were sure they actually could.
As such, it’s all in front of the Patriots. A winning record, playoffs, maybe nine meaningful games down the stretch as the calendar turns to November.
And thankfully those moral victories, plausible excuses and tough losses might just be left to the past.
The lessons learned in failures against the Dolphins and Saints may have paid off. And the last-second losses to NFC Super Bowl contenders from Tampa Bay and Dallas could very well have been learning, growing experiences.
“We’ve played in a lot of these games and fell short. Now we’re starting to turn that page and believing in ourselves, and believing how to win football games. And that’s a big thing,” center David Andrews said.
That it didn’t come easy was probably both telling and appropriate for team learning how to win and developing both its confidence and its identity. The Charger led 7-0 on a pretty easy early drive. And then wouldn’t go away, pulling to within 27-24 with 40 seconds to play on a late touchdown drive that forced an onside kick situation.
But New England made enough plays, yes in all three phases, to get what Belichick called a “really good win.”
There were big plays – none bigger than Adrian Phillips pick-6 interception to take a 24-17 lead, his second pick of the day – and situational execution. Rookie QB Mac Jones may have even had his worst performance as a pro.
But it all came together in the end.
“We just keep building confidence. We know what the formula is,” Damien Harris said after rushing for 80 yards and a touchdown. “We know what we have to do in order to play well. We think when we play well we can play with anybody and we have an opportunity to beat anybody. What’s happened in the past is behind us. What’s happened in the last few games has showed. We’ve been playing better football week after week after week. So we just have to keep doing what we’re doing.”
They had proven early this year that they did have an opportunity to beat anybody. But there is a difference between having an opportunity to beat another good team at home like the Cowboys or Bucs and actually getting it done on the road against the Chargers.
“Great teams win the close games,” Phillips said. “We need to keep stringing these along. Early in the season we were losing those.
It was a mistake here or there. A few mistakes. We knew that if we wanted to take this season where we want to take it you have to win those close games.”
Now that they’ve done that, the Patriots are not yet a great team. But they should be considered a good one. One that is now very much in the midseason mix in the AFC. Just behind the Bills in the AFC East, with a pair December games against Buffalo to be played. With very winnable games on the horizon against the Panthers and Browns.
With more credible hope than at any point in the last couple months.
“Everything is out in front of us. Everything is out in front of us,” Matt Judon reiterated have notching 1.5 sacks for a defense that forced Herbert off his spot to make the young stud passer uncomfortable on the way to a 66.7 passer rating. “We just have to go out there and execute. I keep telling you all, we know what type of team we have. We just have to go out there and prove it.”
That task took a major step forward in L.A.
The Patriots are not a team built on false hope.
They are a team building momentum, winning games and believing more in itself by the day.
November is here. The meat of the NFL season remains.
And New England is a team that looks like it needs to be taken seriously. Seriously.
