Patriots
The Jets are 2-5, or two games behind where they were with Zach Wilson at quarterback through seven games last season.
Welcome to Season 13, Episode 8 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious yet lighthearted, nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup . . .
Eh, we know all about the Patriots’ misery. Six straight losses, including a 32-16 thumping by the Jaguars last Sunday in London. The league’s 30th-rated offense (262.9 yards per game). The league’s 25th-rated defense (359.6 yards per game, and trending in the wrong direction). A rookie coach who has a streak of having to walk back on Monday whatever regrettable thing he said on Sunday. A wide receiver room that has accumulated more cryptic comments on social media than receptions.
We knew this team was rebuilding. We knew it would take years. But the recurrences of chaos and confusion seven games into Jerod Mayo’s tenure serve as a reminder of how good we had it for so long, and of how difficult the climb will be to become competitive in the way fans desire again. A lot of us around here forgot what a lousy football team looks like. But we could do without being reminded every . . . single . . . week.
So let’s talk about the Jets’ misery, because hey, they were supposed to be good, perhaps even a Super Bowl contender with quarterback Aaron Rodgers returning from his Achilles’ injury, and instead they’re 2-5, or two games behind where they were with Zach Wilson at QB through seven games last season. That’s my kind of comedy right there.
One of those two wins came against the Patriots in Week 3, a 24-3 dismantling in which the 40-year-old Rodgers played his best game of the season (27 of 35, 281 yards, 2 TDs), the Jets outgained the Patriots, 252-40, in the first half alone, and Patriots quarterbacks Jacoby Brissett and Drake Maye were sacked seven times.
The Jets have lost four straight since, including a 37-15 thumping by Russell Wilson and the Steelers last week. They’ve averaged just over 15 points per game in those four games, and coach Robert Saleh was fired after a Week 5 loss to the Vikings.
I have no idea if Saleh was a decent head coach — his 20-36 win-loss record would suggest he is not, but he was saddled with the massive degree of difficulty of trying to win with the hapless Wilson the past couple of years. But after watching interim coach Jeff Ulbrich work way too hard to come across as a hardo on “Hard Knocks” last year, I’m confident that they have not upgraded.
The Jets are rich in skill talent, more so with the addition of receiver Davante Adams in a trade with the Raiders on Oct. 15. But is Rodgers still capable of maximizing it? All he has done this year — save for that first meeting with the Patriots — is remind us that Tom Brady’s extraordinary and prolonged success at age 40 or older was an outlier rather than the rule.
Rookie quarterback Drake Maye made his NFL debut in that Week 3 debacle, getting sacked twice in a dozen dropbacks. The Patriots’ primary glimmer of hope will most likely be under constant siege again Sunday against Will McDonald (two sacks in the previous meeting, eight already on the season) and a tireless Jets pass rush.
Maye would greatly benefit from a contribution from the Patriots’ running game, which has compiled fewer than 83 rushing yards in four of the last five games, including a meager 38 last week.
Kick it off, Slye, and let’s get this thing started . . .
Three players worth watching other than the quarterbacks
Breece Hall: The third-year running back, who ran for 994 yards a season ago and also contributed 76 catches for 591 yards, has had an underwhelming season, at least as a ball carrier.
Hall has rushed for just 348 yards and three touchdowns, with a lone 100-yard game. He seemed to have some momentum after picking up 113 yards on the ground two weeks ago against the Bills, but dipped to 38 on 12 attempts vs. the Steelers.
Good news for him, though: The Patriots’ run defense, largely because of attrition, has been abysmal lately, allowing an average of 185.3 yards in losses to the Dolphins, Texans, and Jaguars.
At one point from late in the third quarter to late in the fourth, the Jaguars ran the ball 17 straight times, an agonizing sequence.
Given the Patriots’ talent void in the middle of their defense, Hall should be able to put up his best numbers of the season.
Kyle Dugger: Yep, it’s getting mighty tough to find a Patriot or two to highlight in this spot each week — even Christian Gonzalez, who after Maye is the player voted Most Likely To Still Be Here When The Team Is Good Again, has had a couple of subpar weeks.
So let’s go with Dugger, who is coming off an 11-tackle performance against the Jaguars, the fifth time in his career he has reached double digits. It’s not often a good sign when your safeties are piling up tackles — obviously, it tends to mean that receivers are catching the ball downfield or running backs are bursting into the secondary, which were both frequent occurrences against Jacksonville.
But Dugger, who plays with a high degree of professionalism and should be exempt from Mayo’s criticisms of his defense, deserves credit for doing his best to pick up the slack with the absences of Ja’Whaun Bentley and Jabrill Peppers in the middle.
Davante Adams: The Jets have added so many Friends of Aaron to appease their quarterback the past two years that it’s a minor upset that he hasn’t talked general manager Joe Douglas into signing Robert Kennedy Jr. as a long snapper.
Adams, who had three catches for 30 yards in his Jets debut against the Steelers, has long-established chemistry with Rodgers from their eight years together in Green Bay.
Adams is going to be a significant help, but what’s more interesting is the effect that his presence could have on Garrett Wilson, the Jets’ best receiver (46 catches, 460 yards, 3 TDs) but one who hasn’t always been in Rodgers’s good graces, and vice versa, this season.
The flashback
If the Jets beat the Patriots Sunday, it will be their first sweep of the AFC East opponents’ annual pair of games since 2000.
That was Bill Belichick’s first season, as one may recall, when he began the process of rebuilding a top-heavy roster that still had far more salvageable pieces than the one he left behind more than two decades later.
(Hey, Bill of 2000: Keep an eye on that scrawny QB you took in the sixth round. He might be something.)
The Patriots’ losses to the Jets that year came in Week 2 (20-19 at the Meadowlands) and Week 7 (34-17 at Foxboro Stadium). In the second meeting, Mo Lewis had one of seven sacks on Drew Bledsoe, who threw three picks and lost a fumble. It was not the most consequential time Bledsoe and Lewis would cross paths.
Grievance of the week
Whether or not Belichick ever returns to coaching — and that TV life looks pretty sweet right now — he’s always going to have the last laugh (and snort) against the Krafts.
But can we acknowledge that his defense of the current Patriots defense this past week was extremely disingenuous?
Belichick, during his weekly appearance with semi-verbal human airhorn Pat McAfee, said he felt bad for Patriots defenders whom Mayo called “soft” after the loss to the Jaguars.
“To call them soft . . . They’re not soft, they were the best team in the league last year against the run,” said Belichick.
He’s correct that the Patriots were the best team in the league against the run last year — on a yards-per-carry basis (3.3). And they were first in the AFC (and fourth in the league) in rushing yards allowed (1,584).
But Belichick knows that this defense is not the same one his four-win team had last year. Its guts have been ripped out, by health issues (tackle Christian Barmore, who had 8.5 sacks and 16 quarterback hits last season), injury (Bentley, who had 348 tackles from 2021-23), and off-the-field problems (Peppers, arguably the Patriots’ best player last season).
Some of the names are the same, but this is nowhere near the same defense as the tough and resilient last one he had, in part because Belichick left behind a depth chart that was thinner than the margin for error on a Mac Jones-lofted out-pattern.
Belichick, bless his entertaining pettiness, knows this.
While we’re at it, some of you need to stop being disingenuous about what Belichick left behind here, too. It is true, as many Belichick loyalists like to remind us, that Eliot Wolf re-signed “a bunch of Bill’s players” — among them Barmore, Peppers, Dugger, tight end Hunter Henry, tackle Mike Onwenu, and so on.
But saying that as some sort of validation of the roster Belichick left behind is ridiculous. There are no superstars among those players that were retained, and — this is the important part — this assortment of good players re-signed account for pretty much the entire core of talent on the roster, save for Gonzalez and a few others.
Belichick wasn’t done in here after 20-plus extraordinary years because he lost a single shred of coaching acumen. He was fired because he undermined himself with poor personnel decisions over a string of seasons. I suspect he knows this, too.
Prediction, or Joe Namath threw 47 more interceptions than touchdown passes . . .
The Jets are going to win six games this year, which means they will lose 11, none of which will be Rodgers’s fault in his mind. Sadly, two of those wins are going to come against the Patriots. The Jets’ strengths (pass rush, talent) match up against too many of the Patriots’ weaknesses (pretty much everything other than punting and occasional big plays from the kid QB). Jets 30, Patriots 17.
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