Bill Belichick has been setting us up for this a long time.
As Week 1 approached and reporters asked him about how concerning the Patriots’ offensive performance was in training camp, it was “well, not all bad plays are really that bad” and “September is an extension of the preseason anyway.”
When the offense flamed out in the Raiders game during Preseason Week 3, he lamented that his team left their best plays on the practice field (which reportedly wasn’t that much kinder to New England).
Then, following Sunday’s season-opening loss to the Dolphins, Belichick suggested it was merely two bad plays — the strip-sack on Mac Jones that went for a touchdown and the Jaylen Waddle touchdown catch-and-run on 4th-and-7 right before the half.
Translation: we’re still figuring it out, and it might take a while.
Anyone hoping for a magic turnaround to start the season didn’t get one, and it honestly shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Jones had just 156 yards passing — 41 of those came on one throw to Kendrick Bourne. His decision to throw it against Xavien Howard 1-on-1, which led to an interception, was probably unnecessary, and he simply didn’t look crisp throwing the ball. If he kept that deep shot he attempted for Nelson Agholor down the right sideline catchable, that could’ve been a score.
The Patriots offensive line allowed too many free hits on Jones with one gaffe potentially coming at the hands of rookie Cole Strange and the touchdown sack possibly being the fault of Trent Brown.
Everything looked hard for the offense minus that opening drive of the third quarter. Though the Patriots’ scripted plays to start both halves looked good and Jones clearly had more operational command at the line of scrimmage, Matt Patricia (and Belichick potentially) largely called things a more conservatively and disjointed game plan than you’d figure.
Running 2nd-and-17 after a second-quarter sack or handing it off on three straight attempts when you're down 20-7 and still have a chance to not football you play when you want to win.
Nor is benching Kendrick Bourne, one of the only skill players on your team that routinely creates explosive plays (regardless of how upset you might be with his training camp).
Maybe that’s just it, though. After all that “well, it only looks bad; it’s actually fine” stuff from Belichick this off-season, perhaps that’s truly how they’re approaching it.
While I’m sure they did, they seemingly wanted to do it while experimenting and ironing out kinks.
On one hand, congratulations: you can sort of run the football again! The Patriots had flashes of success both on their old toss plays and their outside zone runs, which featured plenty of cutbacks against the grain.
But no one asked them to also abandon the flat routes that gave Miami trouble on their third-quarter touchdown drive in favor of…more toss sweeps.
Some of it maybe have been ball-control game-planning — keep Tyreek Hill and the Dolphins off the field as much as possible. But it has to be more than that.
The Patriots played Sunday like a team that is still figuring out what it wants to be offensively — something it hasn’t come close to learning in the last few months, apparently. Belichick knows it, and he’s buffering his team and coaching staff against the arrows they’ll take from us about how slow they’re likely to start.
Truthfully, if the Patriots had simply done their jobs better, regardless of play calls, they’d have been in this game at the end. That fact that they didn’t made this feel more like the end of the Josh McDaniels era in Foxborough — not in a good way.
Don’t expect that to change in the next few weeks. If Week 1 was any indication, there's a lot of soul-searching still to be done.
