Is an 'On To Cincinnati' moment looming for 2018 Patriots?

FOXBOROUGH — Deatrich Wise is hungry.

“I can’t speak for everybody else. But I know I’m hungry,” the Patriots defensive end said when asked about a potential Patriots’ rebound this week against Miami. “If I’m hungry, I believe my teammates are hungry too.”

Hungry for a chance at redemption after back-to-back losses, that is. New England is coming into Sunday’s game having lost two of its first three, and sits 1-2 for the first time since 2012.

Forget hungry. In Foxborough, that pretty much constitutes starving.

“We haven’t played well enough,” said center David Andrews Tuesday afternoon.


New England is at a familiar early-season crossroads. The truth is that slow starts — and fast finishes — are nothing new around Foxborough. Since 2012, the Patriots are 18-9 in the first four games of a season, tied for the second-best record in the NFL. In the next four games, they are 21-3, three games better than any other team in that same span.

The early-season stumbles are numerous. In 2001, it was 1-3. In 2003, it was 2-2. There was 2012, as well as 2014 (2-2), 2016 (2-2) and 2017 (2-2). Each one of those teams distinguished itself as a high-character bunch that responded to the challenge of a slow start with equal parts mental and physical toughness, characteristics that came through as New England left itself for a small margin for error because of those early season losses.

“I don’t want to say I’m not worried about it,” Wise said of the state of things in New England. “But it’s one of those things where we (can) learn from situations that happened in the past and use those to move forward.”

When it comes to having the necessary mental toughness to overcome September losses, Bill Belichick said Tuesday it’s too early to try and discern whether or not the 2018 team has genuine championship character.

“Well, we’ll see it over the rest of the remainder of the season,” Belichick said on a conference call. “I mean, every week’s tough in this league, so we’ll see how we handle it. Look, each individual and each team has to prove it every year and every week, and regardless of what any of us have or haven’t done in the past or whatever, we’ll see what happens this year and so will everybody else. We’ll all know the answer to that question as we go through and we march through the season.

“That’s the National Football League,” he added. “It’s a 16-game season. Every team faces adversity over the course of 16 games. So, every team will have an opportunity to deal with it and it will happen more than once to everybody. So, when those opportunities come up, we’ll see how, again, individually each of us and collectively as a team how we fare.”

The most famous tipping point of recent vintage came four years ago. In 2014, when Belichick said the Patriots were, “On to Cincinnati,” they were a team coming off an ugly loss in front of a national TV audience. They were set to face an undefeated Bengals’ team that was coming off a big home win.

This time around, the 2018 Patriots are again coming off an ugly loss in front of a national TV audience. This time around, they’re set to face an undefeated Dolphins’ team that is coming off a big home win.

While Andrews cautioned that it’s a “different team (with) different guys,” there are some lessons learned from the slow starts of previous years they can apply this time around.

“I really think it’s just important to come in and just keep working,” he said Tuesday. “Don’t swing one way or another. I think that’s important throughout an NFL season. You can’t get too high. You can’t get too low. You could win 10 games and then lose the next six. I think it’s just be consistent, come in, keep working, and that’s what we did (Tuesday). That’s what we’ll do (Wednesday).”

At the very least, if you can’t necessarily bank on history repeating itself, this week will give us the answers to some questions that have dogged the Patriots the last two weeks. Will they be able to match their opponents’ early intensity, something that dogged them against Jacksonville and Detroit? Can they get any sort of offensive rhythm? (They’ve scored seven first-quarter points combined in their first three games.) And can the defense get off the field on third down? The Patriots are 30th in the league in third-down defense, allowing teams to convert a whopping 48.7 percent.

"We're not making enough plays in any phase of the game, so we've just got to perform better," Belichick said. "I think the energy and the effort and all of that — we're trying. Everybody's trying hard. We're just not getting it done, which is all that matters."

Ultimately, It’s only Week 4, but the Patriots find themselves at a familiar crossroads. How will they respond? Will Wise and the rest of the roster feast on the Dolphins? Or will they go hungry for another week? The answer to those questions will go a long way toward helping shape the legacy of the 2018 team.