Early struggles have paved way for some ugly road losses for Patriots

FOXBOROUGH — The biggest priority for the Patriots during the bye? Learning how to play better in the first half on the road.

The last two regular-seasons, New England carved out a niche as one of the best road teams in recent NFL history. The Patriots won 15 of 16 on the road those two years, a streak that included 14 straight wins away from home. (For a moment, they appeared capable of threatening the NFL’s all-time record when it came to consecutive road wins — 18 straight, from 1988-90.) The foundation of many of those road wins came with strong starts -- New England outscored its opponents by an average of 16-9 in the first half on the road last season.

This year, the Patriots are 2-3 away from home, and have struggled mightily at the start of each one of the games, wins or losses. In their three road losses, New England has been outscored 34-3 in the first quarter. Even in the wins, the Patriots have had their issues early. They fell behind by 10 against Chicago before posting a comeback win, and managed to score just one offensive touchdown — in the second half — against Buffalo.

Those totals stand in stark contrast to their success at home. New England is 5-0 at Gillette this year, having won by an average of 12 points per game. In that same frame, they’ve outscored teams by an average of 22-6 in the first half at home. In addition, all of Tom Brady’s road-home splits are also fairly dramatic, from completion percentage (69 percent vs. 62 percent), average completion (8.1 to 6.7), TD ratio (11:5 to 6:2) and passer rating (101.5 to 87.7).

So what’s the thinking behind the road/home struggles? Asking a handful of veterans in the locker room, and many of them point to the same thing.



“It’s definitely it’s slow starts,” said Phillip Dorsett. “It’s hard to come from behind in this league. We have to play better on the road. Simple as that. We came out phenomenal when we’re home, but we have to take more pride in playing better on the road. That’s what it’s going to take. We got it done last year. We have a handful of road games left, and we have to win away from home.”

“The road is just one of those things where you have to bring your own energy,” said Trey Flowers. “It’s not an excuse or anything, but it’s just one of those things where you have to come in … they have their crowd behind them and they have that energy. We have to figure out how to match that energy. You can see it on a lot of losses we’ve had on the road — we started slow and got ourselves in a hole. From there, it gave them energy, and we couldn’t execute the game plan.

“It’s just one of those things, we have to bring it every time. We have to understand that.”

Devin McCourty referenced the 58-yard opening kickoff return last week against the Jaguars.

“When you start the game off (with) a terrible job on kickoff and the team takes the ball all the way back to your 40-yard line, like … it’s just tough to bring energy,” he lamented.

“I think we’ve just got to do a better job of weathering the storm, whether it be at home or away. It’s shown up away. It hasn’t really shown up that much at home, because we’ve gotten off to good starts. But I think we have to do a better job of just weathering the storm and giving ourselves a chance to bring energy and get going instead of just like letting it snowball.”