Pats defense must improve against run
FOXBORO — The improvement on defense has been nearly across the board, but in one aspect the Patriots still lag far from where they’d like to be — the run defense. It has been consistently bad.
Through 12 games, the Pats have allowed at least 100 yards rushing eight times. That surpasses each of the previous three years. Last week, the 183 yards the Buffalo Bills put up were the most since the Kansas City Chiefs rushed for 185 in the opener.
Maybe in a league where the passing game dictates so much success, that weakness doesn’t mean as much as it used to. And, with an offense that is so efficient and forces opponents into throwing their way back into games, maybe it doesn’t end up costing the Pats a game. And at the end of the day, when the last eight opponents have failed to score more than 17 points, is it even that big of a deal?
Well, the Patriots don’t want to find out. As linebacker Marquis Flowers explains, there’s no such thing as an insignificant flaw.
“I don’t care if it’s a blowout. You don’t want a team just running the ball on you,” Flowers said yesterday. “I think we take that personal. Anyone would. But the guys here, the competitive guys here, obviously we let it slip a little bit. Just because we win doesn’t mean we’re gong to ignore it. We, obviously, we’ve got great coaches . ... We put it on tape. It is what it is. We didn’t have our best week last week in the run game, but we’ve got four weeks to improve.”
In the same way the Pats corrected their communication problems in the secondary early in the season, Flowers has confidence that this issue can be fixed, and he knows it doesn’t happen with a snap of a finger.
“It works itself out to the outside public,” he said. “It looks like it just works itself out. But in here, we go. We go grind. We look at what we need to work at and we go grind.”
That grind is something the team enjoys, rather than shies away from.
“That’s what makes this group so special. We all like the challenge because it’s not just one person that’s going to stop the run,” Flowers said. “It’s all 11 of us that are going to come up and stop the run. We’ve got to come together and we’ve got a challenge in front of us.
“The Dolphins, they’ve got a lot of talent. They’ve got an explosive back in (Kenyan) Drake. He’s looking at that. What do you think that he’s thinking? That’s every week, but especially this week. We’ve got to go out there and we know what we have to do.”