Bill Belichick’s Patriots have faced a lot of battles on a lot of fronts this season.
Certainly there’s been the obvious, front-facing battle each Sunday with a difficult schedule of opponents like the Eagles, Dolphins, Cowboys and Bills. That battle hasn’t gone very well very often.
Then there’s been the battle with themselves in New England. The weekly battle to try to play clean, competitive, complementary football. The battle to keep from turning the ball over, making mistakes, digging early holes in games and simply playing losing football. Again, that battle has not gone great.
There are also the inherent football battles that every NFL team goes through, the fight with injuries and officiating that seem so much more magnified in defeat than in teams that find a way to overcome them. Belichick and his team fell into the latter category in the past, but have trended toward the former of late, at least acknowledging the low-hanging excuses that can be so tempting.
There is no doubt that that NFL season is a long, difficult battle. Teams either stand up and fight the good fight, or they fall victim to it.
And now, with New England sitting in last place in the entire AFC as one of the truly worst teams in football in any measure, another battle can be added to the Patriots list of fights: the battle with human nature.
Without being dismissively disrespectful to the game, the men who play it or their professionalism, the 2-6 Patriots really have little to play for the rest of this dismal 2023 season. There will be no division title, playoff chase or important games being played after Thanksgiving this season, unless jockeying for top draft picks is your kind of “important” games.
Patriots captain and most tenured player Matthew Slater knows exactly what kind of battle his team is about to face over the final nine games of a season that is all but over even as it is far from over. He declared after the latest ugly loss in Miami that his team was in “uncharted waters” and was going to find out “what kind of character we have “
A day later in his weekly appearance on “Jones & Mego” on WEEI, Slater expanded on his viewpoint of the challenges New England faces in the days, weeks and months ahead.
“I think it goes without saying, when you experience the amount of adversity that we have this year and your record is what it is, you have to fight human nature,” Slater told WEEI. “I think that’s going to be across the board. You have to fight human nature. You start letting certain things creep into your mind. You start letting your habits slip. You start looking ahead to the future. And we just can’t do that. I think collectively we have to make sure that we’re not taking for granted the opportunity that we have to keep coming out to play football, we need to do it with a sense of pride, a sense of urgency and we’ll see what happens as we move forward.”
Indeed we will. Will Slater and his struggling teammates continue to battle all that comes their way? Will Belichick, who’s seen and done it all in his nearly five decades of NFL experience be able to motivate and guide through these rough, uncharted waters in Foxborough?
The first eight games of the 2023 season have been difficult in so many ways for so many members of the New England organization.
And it’s not going to get any easier. The opponents keep coming. The mistakes will be made. The results will likely be lackluster at best and debilitating at worst.
Now, the Patriots as both individuals and a team have to figure out how they are going to respond. The going is indeed tough, but are they?
“That’s something I’m trying to get in front of,” Slater said of the battle with human nature. “I haven’t seen that from this group. I don’t anticipate seeing that from this group. But, again, all of us are human and none of us are perfect.”
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