PatsPropaganda

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Patriots Gameplan: Week 17 vs. New York Jets

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Ah, the final gameplan of the season. These are always my favorite pieces of the week to write, and now as I sit here in California on my final day of vacation, preparing myself to return to the arctic cold of Boston, I can’t help but feel a bit relieved that the regular season prologue is nearly behind us.

Let’s be honest, at this point it’s hard to move the needle for Patriots fans. Looking back on 2017 it’s hard to recount much more than the Steeler game and the injuries. Wins are relief. Losses are catastrophic. Then we get to this point, where the Patriots will hopefully wrap up the first seed, and none of it really matters.

So here we are, staring down the barrel of another 13-3 season. A meltdown loss to the Jets at this point would be beyond surprising. Our 5-10 pals from New York adjacent are closing out a disappointing season, but they still gave the Pats trouble back in October, with the Pats getting a 4th down stop at their own 49 yard line to preserve the 24-17 win.

Considering the circumstances now, with the Pats needing a win to assure themselves of homefield advantage and the Jets ready to mail it in to the offseason, not to mention the bone chilling cold which this game will be played in, all signs point to the Pats rolling.

Here’s the gameplan…

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Breaking Down Patriots’ 3rd Down Nose Dive on Offense

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Third down is the most critical down in football and usually the Patriots are one of the best offenses in the league. In the last four seasons they ranked 6th (2014) and 4th (2016) when they won the Super Bowl and when they didn’t they ranked 16th (2013) and 11th (2015).

This season the loss of Julian Edelman loomed large for then third down offense. Edelman was then most targeted and reliable receiver with the game on the line. However early in then season the Pats didn’t fare too badly,

Through the first eight games, the Pats ranked 3rd on third down, converting 45.9 percent of their chances.

But since then they’ve fallen off dramatically, to the point where over the last four games they’ve converted just 30.2 percent of their third downs, second-worst in the league. All of Tom Brady‘s five interceptions in the last four games have come on third down.

These struggles are coming at the wrong time of year. Is this a critical flaw? Is there any hope in sight? Let’s take a deeper look.

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Malcolm Mitchell Back at Patriots Practice

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The surprising end-of-year Patriots news continued today with Malcolm Mitchell showing up in pads at practice. This means the Pats now have 21 days to activate him off of IR, though Mike Giardi reports that he could see game action as soon as this Sunday against the Jets in the season finale.

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Pats Sacks Up Despite Uneven Recent Defensive Performance

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The Patriots rode a dominant second half to their 12th win of the year against the Bills on Sunday, clinching a first round bye in the process and all but insuring that the AFC playoffs will come through Foxborough. While Dion Lewis stole most of the headlines after racking up 196 all-purpose yards, the Patriots front seven deserves a lot of credit for shutting down Buffalo in critical moments, most notably with Marquis Flowers’ takedown of Tyrod Taylor in the red zone on 4th down and Malcolm Brown’s 15 yard sack on the first play of Buffalo’s drive after the Pats had tied it at 16.

In total, the Patriots racked up six sacks, hit Taylor on four other occasions, and were consistently in Buffalo’s backfield. In fact, in the past five games, the Patriots have averaged 4.2 sacks per game, a rate that would put them above the NFL’s overall sack leaders, the Jacksonville Jaguars, who have put up 3.5 sacks per game on average. Sure, the Jaguars have done this over the course of 15 games, and the Patriots sample size is just five games, but this still shows just how well the Patriots have been playing of late.

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Patriots Add James Harrison

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You might’ve gotten the impression that I was a bit concerned about the Patriots defense heading into January after my piece from this morning. For those reasons I welcomed the afternoon’s news of James Harrison signing with the team just days after his somewhat surprising release by the Steelers.

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The 2017 Patriots Defense: Can Patchwork Front, Inconsistent Back Get It Done?

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The Patriots defense turned in another signature effort against the Bills that we’ve seen in recent weeks — early struggles on third down, some big plays allowed, only to see them tighten up in the second half and allow the offense to pull away.

I’m not here to sugar coat it guys, this defense is a shell of what we’ve seen in recent years and obviously injuries are a huge part of it. The other part of it is that the secondary, which is healthy, needed to step up and lead the way for the decimated front seven. At best, they’ve been inconsistent. At worst they’ve been lit up repeatedly no matter who they’re facing. But again, they’ve made the plays they needed to to win games.

But as I look around at the personnel up front I wonder how many stop gaps there are and how many actual building blocks there are.

I’d break it down like so:

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Pats Posits: One More to Go

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Merry Christmas from the West Coast! It was a unique experience for me yesterday as I was on a plane and left with no better option than listening to the Patriots win over the Bills via the Sports Hub radio stream. It’s been a while since I experienced a game only on the radio, but it was fun to finally get to see the big plays later in the day and I thought Zolak and Socci were fun to listen to.

So here we are, the Pats are 12-3 with one game to go, and really all I see is a pile of negativity everywhere I look. I get it, everyone outside of Patriots Nation is so sick of the Patriots. Now, instead of getting excited post-game it immediately becomes about deflecting that negativity.

Bad calls, the Jimmy G situation and the Alex Guerrero thing are the stories driving the Patriots’ narrative these days. It feels like this was the year that the Patriots finally broke the rest of the NFL. Long gone are the “they haven’t won anything since Spygate,” that was such a reassuring crutch for those who hate the Patriots. Now they’re left with no such crutch.

Wins alone are no longer close to enough for even those in our tribe. Wins are boring now. Wins can’t drive the Patriots’ season narrative because it’s just been so played out. So instead it’s all about the secondary stuff and that’s just so frustrating that here in the last few seasons of Brady we can’t really enjoy a win being a win. Now everyone wants to talk about anything but the wins.

More frustrating is the direction it’s all trending, pointing toward how things will look and sound when the Brady-Belichick era is over. We now know that Jimmy G will be hung around our necks for all time. And it will be even worse if Belichick misfires on the second round pick we got for him. I knew it would be bad for Patriots’ fans in the aftermath of the dynasty as everyone lined up and piled on, but the sneak preview we’re getting now makes me realize it will be even worse than we imagined.

But the good news, that everyone has seemingly forgotten, is again that the Pats will be the top AFC seed with a win over the Jets, the bye is already secure and clearly, the dynasty isn’t over yet as much as everyone outside of our fandom want it to be.

Here are the Posits on the win over Buffalo and even some of the ancillary BS.

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