Patriots take advantage of woeful Denver special teams play in rout of Broncos

DENVER — A huge part of winning in Denver is keeping the crowd out of the game, and the Patriots’ special teamers set the tone in the early going with their performance on Sunday night.



Thanks in large part to the work of Jonathan Jones, New England forced a fumble on its first punt of the game, with Jacob Hollister coming away with the ball after Isaiah McKenzie botched the return. That set the stage for a quick two-play drive that ended with a touchdown pass to Rex Burkhead that gave the Patriots a quick lead.

“That’s huge,” said veteran safety Devin McCourty of the early turnover. “We knew McKenzie had muffed a couple.”

“It happened pretty quickly,” McKenzie recalled after the game. “The punter kicked it short, and I thought I had a chance to get it. I should have made a fair catch with a guy in my face. He hit me, and the ball came out.”

After the Broncos responded with a field goal to cut the lead to 7-3, Dion Lewis returned the ensuing kickoff 103 yards for New England’s first special teams’ touchdown of the year, a thunderbolt that gave the Patriots a 14-3 lead.

The third big play came with just under 11 minutes left in the first half when Burkhead blocked a Riley Dixon punt, giving the Patriots another short field and setting the stage for a 28-yard field goal from Stephen Gostkowski, one of two field goals on the night for the New England kicker.

“We had a rush called,” Burkhead said of the blocked punt, the first of the season for the Patriots. “I rushed on the outside and it just kind of opened up. The guy, he tried to block me up high or something, and (Brandon) King did a great job of widening his guy outside.”

It all helped set the stage for a 41-16 rout of the Broncos.

“They stepped up and made the plays, so I’d give them the credit,” Bill Belichick said of the Patriots’ special teams unit, which lost captain Matthew Slater midway through the game with a hamstring issue. “A lot of different guys making tackles, making blocks in the return game and getting down on punt coverage. It wasn’t one guy. It was the entire unit and there were several different units unvoiced. That speaks to our entire team.”

“That’s a big area where we want to be a win for us each and every week,” defensive back Duron Harmon said of their work on special teams. “We want to go out there and know that our special teams are always going to dominate because we put the work in. We watch the extra film. We practice hard. We go over it a lot more than probably a lot of other teams, so each and every week, we want to go out there and we want special teams to be a win for us. Those guys continue to make big plays for us, and it turned out to be a win for us (Sunday).”