new england patriots

I’ve been letting it sink in all morning that Vince Wilfork is likely done for the season after tearing his achilles. In some ways losing Wilfork like this almost felt inevitable. One of the big themes I hit on all offseason was bringing in more defensive tackle help to ease the burden on big Vince.

Let’s look at the percentages of snaps Wilfork has played over the last four seasons:

2009: 51.8 percent 
2010: 69.8 percent 
2011: 86.8 percent 
2012: 81.3 percent 

That’s a lot of wear and tear on a man of his size, and it’s hard not to wonder if all that playing time finally caught up with him. It was clear that Wilfork was already playing with some kind of injury this year and that diminished his effectiveness. How much that had to do with this final achilles year is hard to say right now.

So where do the Pats go from here? There’s no question of Wilfork’s value to the defense and his ability to dominate the interior of the line. The lack of depth at defensive tackle has also been well discussed.

Tommy Kelly becomes the main guy inside, which I feel a lot better about than I would’ve had it been Kyle Love or Brandon Deaderick last year. Joe Vellano has held up pretty well inside, and it seems likely that Marcus Forston will get the call up from the practice squad. Rookie Chris Jones could contribute as well.

I don’t necessarily think the Pats are immediately looking to the free agent market to find someone to replace Wilfork. I especially doubt Love or Richard Seymour will be back (as much as I’d love to see Big Sey back). The Pats are usually about “next man up” and that’s probably the approach they’ll take.

But let’s look at it this way, for the past three seasons we’ve had a defense with an elite defensive tackle and a sub-par secondary, and the result was a defense that was routinely lit up through the air.

So now perhaps we’re looking at a defense with average-at-best defensive tackles, but a possibly elite secondary. Hopefully that can ease the loss of Wilfork and really, it does little to hurt the Pats’ effectiveness against the pass, all things considered.

I’ve long wanted Wilfork’s passing down snaps reduced, and I think Vellano, Jones, and eventually Armond Armstead can do just fine replacing him, and likely improving the level of pass rush.

The problem will be against the running teams when the Pats can’t take away the opposition’s favorite run hole with Wilfork. This will put some more focus on Brandon Spikes in games like those, where his job to shut down the run game will be even tougher.

Another huge problem area could be on runs against the Pats’ sub-defense. Wilfork might not have been an elite pass rusher, but his presence in the sub-defense certainly discouraged offense’s ability to run on them.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever see big Vince get back to the level he was at the last few seasons. This could be a tough injury to overcome and could signal the beginning of the end of his time in New England.

There’s no question he will be missed on and off the field, but the Pats have built up enough talent on their defense that it is not the same kind of devastating blow it would’ve been from 2010-2012.

It’s early enough in the season, they’ll just have to overcome.