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Pats Posits: Brace for Hot Takes

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The 2018 Patriots fell back to earth with a thud, losing to the Jaguars in a decidedly lackluster performance.  The defense, losing both key cogs Patrick Chung and Trey Flowers to concussions, looked every bit as terrible as the squad we saw against the Eagles in Super Bowl 52.

Offensively, the Patriots completely fell into my gameplan trap. They couldn’t run the ball, got into third-and-longs and couldn’t covert. There was no explosiveness out of the offense with Phillip Dorsett and Chris Hogan largely invisible and Cordarrelle Patterson‘s trick plays largely ineffective.

Not much worked for the Patriots on Sunday. But this isn’t uncharted territory and September stinkers are often the norm, not the exception. They looked every bit as listless against the Chiefs in 2014 and 2017 and both those squads still made the Super Bowl. If anything this is just a reminder that it’s a long season and what happens on September 15th can often have little or no effect on what happens in February.

The important thing is to figure out ‘what now.’ The Patriots still fought hard, a sign of nearly all Belichick’s teams, but they made way too many mistakes and way too few plays. Building off sparks like Kyle Van Noy‘s interception and Stephon Gilmore‘ and Trey Flowers’ forced fumbles. These Patriots never packed it in, but do they have the pieces to overcome the glaring number of shortcomings they displayed?

Let’s dive into some gut reaction Posits.

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Patriots Gameplan: Week 2 at Jacksonville Jaguars

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Week Two is here and the Patriots face a tough AFC Championship rematch on the road in Jacksonville. How many times have we seen these kinds of games early in the season? The young upstarts are looking for a franchise-altering win. Sometimes, like the 2009 and 2010 Jets,  they live up to the hype. But often the emotional drain of beating the Patriots makes the young upstarts sleepwalk through the rest of their season.

More often than not the Patriots just prove their still the Patriots.

There’s no question the Jaguars are a talented team, but talented teams are hit or miss when they go against methodical football machines. If the Jags play with the kind of energy that the 2009 Jets did, they could and should exact their revenge. The Patriots are in it for the long haul though and even a loss in Florida that exposes flaws will be just a bump in the road of their development toward December and January.

It’s always fun to have an exciting road game against a potential new rival early in the season. What do the Pats have to do to get the win and make the rest of the league Patriots-depressed again?

Here’s the gameplan.

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A Look Back: Patriots-Jaguars 2017 AFC Championship

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The 2017 AFC Championship was a dogfight down to the end, with the young and hungry Jags pushing the Patriots to the very limit. Really, the Jags exposed the Patriots in a way that the Eagles would build off of in Super Bowl 52. They had quite a few chances to put the game away, but the Pats do what they always do, hang on and make the key plays at the end.

Despite some limitations of Blake Bortles, the Jags are one of the teams vying to dethrone the Patriots from AFC supremacy, and they certainly have the defensive pieces to make it happen. But this is a different Patriots team than the one that played last January and that includes both good reasons and bad reasons.

What can we determine from last year’s matchup? That this will be a test for the 2018 Pats that truly tells if they’ve put the problems of last season behind them.

The Patriots had a slow start to the game, falling into a 14-3 hole. The Jags sniffed out most of the underneath stuff Tom Brady, with a stitched-up hand, loves to rely on. Much of the offense relied shot plays to Cooks, or the PI calls that came with them sometimes. It was a true grind-it-out offensive performance and one that will be hard to replicate with entirely new pieces.

The simple fact is that the primary players outside of Brady who helped the Pats win this game are no longer on the team. But the flip side of the coin is that the defense which made just enough plays to win is much improved.

So which side wins?

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Film Review: Pats vs. Jags AFC Championship

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After a day of wonky performance by NFL Game Rewind I was finally able to get it to function long enough to take a look at the All-22 film from the AFC Championship. It’s always nice to get a clean strategic view of the game without my stomach turning after every bad Patriots play.

I came away even more impressed with how the Jags executed, especially early. But really from the start of the second half you could see the Patriots taking their game to another level while the Jags were slowly starting to fade as they got closer and closer to a potential win. It’s just remarkable how steady the Patriots are. Some of the late punts in the second half left an even bigger impression on me because most teams would’ve packed it in.

Aside from the Patriots perseverance it was clear that the flaws of the 2017 team were still very much there. And with Dion Lewis mostly ineffective until the final game-sealing carry, it’s just incredible what Brady did, almost exclusively with Danny Amendola.

Great play designs, great adjustments and an unflinching approach to the game were the hallmarks of this performance.

Here are a bunch of my quick-hit thoughts.

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Patshow #122: AFC Championship Recap Show!

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Here’s today’s hot-off-the-live-video-press episode of Patshow, our AFC Championship recap edition.Thank you to everyone who has supported Patshow this year! It’s grown at an incredible rate here in the last couple months and we hope we can continue to bring the fans the kind of show they’ve been clearly dying for. It’s our latest and greatest episode yet, we talk Jags, breakdown Danny Amendola’s clutch performance and answer a ton of viewer questions! Enjoy!!

Pats Posits: Belichick and Brady off to Super Bowl No. 8

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The Patriots defeated the Jaguars 24-20 in the AFC Championship and will return to the Super Bowl for the third time in four years where they’ll face the Philadelphia Eagles. The Patriots faced the Eagles the last time they were attempting three-of-four titles and defeated them in Super Bowl 39.

There will be plenty of time to jump into that intriguing matchup, but for now we have to talk about the AFC Championship. Really, it was one of the most remarkable games in Patriots history. The Jaguars played absolutely perfectly for the first 50 minutes. They attacked the Patriots’ weaknesses, they played mistake-free and they even knocked out Rob Gronkowski. Dion Lewis was getting nothing on the ground and the Jaguars had a number of early sustained drives.

But the Pats kept battling like they always do. Without Gronk or a running game, Brady, with some help from super clutch Danny Amendola, willed the Patriots to victory. Of course it didn’t come without the defense turning around after getting shredded early. They once again made the key plays that opened the door for the Patriots to come back. Stephon Gilmore‘s pass defense sealed what was a championship-worthy performance by a defense comprised of many new faces from last season.

I always say you can never truly appreciate a win until you’ve accepted a loss is very possible, and this game had that. Of course 28-3 has ruined us in that regard because now, more than ever, we know the Patriots are never truly out of it until the clock reads zero.

This never gets old. And the Patriots keep finding new ways to demonstrate just how mentally and physically tough they are. The Jags had all the look of the teams that beat the Patriots at home in the playoffs — the two Ravens teams and one Jets team all had a swagger about them, a fearlessness that Jacksonville seemed to emanate as well. But this time their clean game didn’t matter because the Patriots simply outplayed them in the final ten minutes.

It was perfect football in all three phases and in tight games like this that’s what makes all the difference. When it came time to finish the game the Jags couldn’t do it, and Tom Brady did.

Here are the Posits on another crazy epic playoff win.

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