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Archives for October 11, 2016

Patriots Special Teams Report – Week 5 @ Cleveland Browns

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Patriots Special Teams 16wk5

What a return it was for the greatest quarterback to ever live. Having to watch Jacoby Brissett for two and a half games really makes one appreciate the greatness of Tom Brady even more, and it seemed to elevate and motivate the entire team as a whole. Special teams had another solid week, with the lone hiccup being Stephen Gostkowski’s third miss on the season.

Gostkowski started the season off on the right foot, nailing all three field goals (at distances of 47, 53, and 32 yards) against Arizona in Week 1, and was named the AFC Specialist of the Week. However, it’s been all downhill from there for the highest-paid kicker in the NFL since: Gostkowski has missed three of his next seven kicks in the past four games (keep in mind, he missed three total last season).

He missed a 39-yarder wide right against Miami, pushed a 48-yarder to the right of the goalposts against Buffalo, and most recently hit one too far to the right on a 50-yarder on Sunday. Notice a trend on his misses? All wide right. All of his misses have had plenty of distance, but each time his kicks have sailed too far to the right. Seeing as Gostkowski is the fourth-most accurate kicker in NFL history, Patriot Nation should be confident that he will correct whatever flaw is ailing him at the moment. Be sure to watch how Gostkowski does in the coming weeks, even on the ones he makes.  

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Patriots-Browns Film Review: Third Down Defense Edition

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In this week’s film review I’m going to take a little more micro look at the third downs that the Patriots failed to get stops on against the Browns. Right now the Patriots are 27th in the NFL in third down defense (44.6 percent, worst since 2010) and 30th in red zone defense (80 percent).

Combine the two and the Patriots are by far the worst third down defense in the red zone in the NFL, giving up a first down 83.3 percent of the time. The second-worst team in the league, Baltimore, is at 70 percent, while the third-worst, Houston, is at 57.1 percent. That shows just how far below the rest of the league the Patriots have been in the critical area of their beloved bend-don’t-break, which depends immensely on third down stops in the red zone.

Now I’m not here to go all doom and gloom on the defense. These stats are certainly concerning, but there’s a long way to go and with Tom Brady back in the mix, we’re just getting our first taste of the real 2016 Patriots. So we can reserve some judgement at this point.

Here’s a look at five third downs against the Browns with what went wrong and how the Pats might fix it.

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Pats Posits: Tuesday Leftovers Edition

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Things certainly seem back to normal this week. Brady had a vintage Brady performance, all the Jimmy/Jacoby stuff can be put on the backburner (at least by me) until next offseason and the Pats are once again in the driver’s seat in both the conference and the division.

This feels like Belichick/Brady Patriots football!

Here are some leftover tidbits as I cleaned out my Pats notebook and looked back at a few key moments in the game before diving into the All-22 once it becomes available.

— Plenty of digging on how the Pats used Bennett and Gronk going on. Kevin Duffy of Masslive.com had a good breakdown:

Here was Gronkowski’s breakdown by alignment on snaps with Bennett:
In-line: 31
Slot: 8
Wide: 4

And here was Bennett’s:
In-line: 35
Slot: 4
Wide: 4

The Pats rans on 19 of the 30 snaps both tight ends were in-line, but some of their biggest pass plays came out of those kind of sets as well, including Bennett’s 37-yard touchdown. This illustrates the power of having two all-around Y tight ends — they can dictate however they want to. And the play action is going to absolutely devastating this season. And it really boils down to keep them mostly in-line and working from there.

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