Patriots intent on fixing their sloppy performance
Tom Brady had done enough to win. He had held his news conference, and now it was time to survey the damage.
Still sporting his game pants but wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt cut at the sleeves, he strolled from teammate to teammate to discuss what happened and what went wrong.
No, the New England Patriots did not lose Saturday night. In fact, they beat the Houston Texans by 18 points in their divisional round playoff game, giving them the right to host the AFC Championship Game next week. This, however, was not the crisp and clean performance that has come to define New England.
After chatting with tight end Martellus Bennett for a couple of minutes, Brady stopped by receiver Michael Floyd’s locker. Brady pulled Floyd in for a hug. As he wrapped him in his arms, Brady consoled him.
“Don’t worry,” Brady told Floyd, just above a whisper. “We’ll be better next week.”
This was one of the worst offensive games for the Patriots all season long.
The Patriots tied a season high with three turnovers, although the other time it happened — Week 14 against the Baltimore Ravens — two of the fumbles came on kickoff returns. Brady completed 18 of 38 passes (a 47.4% completion rate, lowest of his postseason career) for 287 yards and two touchdowns with two interceptions. His two picks tied his total for the regular season, which came in 432 passing attempts.
“We’ve just got to learn from it,” Brady told reporters Saturday night in his news conference. “This team did a great job playing against us. They had some good scheme stuff that worked. They have good rushers and they had some good guys in coverage, so they had a pretty good scheme. It was a lot of things, and then when you add our poor execution on top of that, then you add our turnovers on top of that, it doesn’t feel great because we worked pretty hard to play a lot better than we played.”
The key was Houston’s pass rush. The Texans sacked Brady twice, pressured him relentlessly through a weak spot in the middle of the offensive line for eight quarterback hits on the evening and threw off the offensive timing and rhythm.
“We hit him when we wanted to,” Texans defensive end Jadeveon Clowney said. “We were getting to him.”
As receiver Julian Edelman added, “We made plays when we had to. But if we want to keep winning and move on, we can’t play like that.”
So how do the Patriots ensure that they clean up their errors from Saturday?
The key — unsurprisingly for a Bill Belichick-coached team — is to work ahead.
“It doesn’t matter who we play,” Belichick said Sunday in a conference call with reporters.
“Each coach has his own part of the game plan or scouting report and preparation for his players to do. If he chooses to do something on one team, or guy, or whatever, it’s 50-50 whether that could be right or not. You do what you think is the most important thing or what’s best for your group or that area that you’re responsible for. We’ve done all of the work on both teams that we can do from a staff standpoint.
“We have all of the games broken down except for tonight’s game. We have people on our staff that work on our next opponent, just like we always do. This one’s a little tougher because we’re working on two teams instead of one, but they’ve just worked harder and got it done. We all have the information that’s available. We won’t know until later tonight who it’s going to be, but that’s where we’re at.”
New England’s defense, which led the NFL in the regular season in scoring (15.6 points per game allowed), carried it to a victory Saturday. Next week, the offense will have to do better.
Perhaps Bennett summed it up best shortly after his brief conference with Brady.
“An ugly date,” he said, “is better than no date.”