Pats pull away from Jets in 2nd half
EAST RUTHERFORD >> If games in the National Football League ever get reduced to 30 minutes, perhaps the Jets will stand a chance of beating a team like the New England Patriots.
Until then, however, it’ll be more of the same.
After both teams were tied following a stunningly competitive first half, Tom Brady and the Patriots pulled away in the second half en route to a 27-13 win over Gang Green in front of 77,982 fans — many of them wearing New England colors — at MetLife Stadium on Sunday afternoon.
The Jets losing streak is now at five games — the longest under soon-to-be-fired head coach Todd Bowles — and it doesn’t seem to be coincidence that a defense that was torched for 498 total yards by Bill Belichick and co. on Sunday hasn’t managed a takeaway during that span.
“It’s frustrating losing one game, nevertheless five,” Bowles said. “In the first half, it was a nip-and-tuck ballgame. We were at it. We let some runs out with the run fits and we didn’t make enough plays on offense and we left plays out there…we’re going to fight every week. We fought the Buffalo game. We just didn’t play smart. We fought this game and we didn’t execute in the second half, so we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and we’ve got to finish the ballgame.”
Incredibly, the Jets actually had an early lead in the game; Josh McCown finished a nine-play, 80-yard drive with a 16-yard touchdown pass to Jermaine Kearse, his first score of the season, to make it a 7-0 game.
However, apparently that proverbial drawing board entailed giving the Patriots a gift on the next possession. Faced with the choice of accepting an offensive pass interference call on an incomplete pass on third down that would have give Brady 3rd and 12 from the Jets 34 or declining to make it 4th and 2, Bowles chose to accept. One play later, and Rob Gronkowski was in the end zone.
Back to the drawing board. Again. “Third-and-12 are better odds than fourth-and-two and we knew they were going to go for it because they typically do on fourth-and-two,” Bowles explained. “We had a better chance at third-and-12.” Apparently not.
After that, the seemingly inevitable eventually unfolded; Brady carried a 25-7 record against the Jets heading into Sunday, and New England was 11-1 with a +209 point differential in their last 12 AFC East games.
Stephen Gostkowski and Jason Myers traded field goals towards the end of the second quarter to send the teams to the half tied 10-10, but New England was able to make the necessary adjustments at halftime to open up the game, outscoring the Jets 17-3 from that point forward.
Gostkowski and Myers again traded field goals, but a four-play, 75-yard drive that took only 2:08 off the clock culminated in Brady finding Julian Edelman for a 21-yard touchdown pass to make it a 2013 game with 1:52 left in the third quarter. Sony Michel, who led a Patriots rushing game that slashed the Jets for 215 yards with 133 of his own, iced the game with a late one-yard run.
“There were just a couple plays we saw scheme-wise that we just had to talk about and if they came up again, knowing kind of how we wanted to play those differently,” said Patriots safety Devin McCourty. “Then the rest of it was kind of what we talked about all week — just trying to get on their guys, making it tough and I thought what also helps is when the pass rush does a good job of getting to the quarterback and that helped us out a lot in the second half.”