FOXBOROUGH – You can talk all day about points, yards and third-down conversion percentage allowed. The Buffalo Bills took a violent swat at the character of the New England Patriots’ defense in Sunday afternoon’s Gillette Stadium stampede.
Nobody in the home blueberry unis chose to step up and swing back.
As safety Devin McCourty noted, "It's too late in the season to not play your best football. We've got to play better. We need to make a play. We are not making those plays. It hasn't been good.”
There’s an argument to be made that the past two weeks have been the worst of the year for this defense – a group that swaggered and celebrated like it was February during the Pats’ earlier seven-game win streak.
Sunday, the biggest game of the year with the potential AFC East crown hanging in the balance, they responded like church mice, allowing Josh Allen and the depleted Bills to roll up 428 yards, chew up 36:09 off the clock and basically give punter Matt Haack the afternoon off (yes, I know he held on PATs and field goals). And this was following up last week’s 226-yard rushing night by Jonathan Taylor and the Colts.
Give McCourty credit. He and linebacker Kyle Van Noy were the lone Patriots defenders to face the media after this debacle, which saw Buffalo click on 6 of 12 third downs and 3 of 4 fourth downs, scoring points on six of eight possessions (including the final kneeldowns).
Where was Matt Judon, who went sack-less for the second straight week? Judon was last seen celebrating an incomplete pass … with a solo 30-yard, “look at me” sprint up the field to the delight of the Gillette faithful.
Two plays later, Tyler Bass nailed a 34-yard field goal to make it 20-7. If those are the victories that this defense is going to party over, that’s a problem.
Or as McCourty stated, “We’re guaranteed two more games, and that’s it.”
Judon was supposed to be this defense’s stand-up guy. Remember him in August at training camp, how he had no problem talking to the media after every practice or game? How he would be held accountable?
DNS-Player’s decision.
(Adam Richins for BSJ)
Where was JC Jackson after this one?
He had no problem finding the microphone after all those wins. Too bad he couldn’t locate Stephon Diggs with such alacrity on Sunday.
Diggs pulled in seven Allen offerings for 85 yards and a TD.
The Bills receiver had all the big plays when it mattered.
Fourth-and-2? Diggs for 11.
Third-and-11? Diggs for 12 and the score.
Third-and-10 in the fourth? Diggs for 19 on the way to Dawson Knox’s game-clinching TD.
Jackson? He had one chance to turn this thing around, an errant cookie tossed right to him by a panicked Allen in the right flat. And he dropped it.
Again postgame? DNS-Player’s decision.
Players have it easy now because of Covid-19. There’s no horde waiting by their lockers for answers. It’s a five-or-six question, controlled Q&A. And these two chose not to answer for this 33-point (allowed) performance.
Hate to bring up a sore subject here, but Stephon Gilmore – Anyone think he might have made some kind of difference in this secondary? – was there every game, win or lose, until the last, most annoying question had been responded to.
Van Noy sounded puzzled after his five-tackle effort.
“It’s disappointing to lose right? Especially when the standard is really high and you have high expectations for yourself and your teammates, so it’s disappointing when you lose, but we can’t point the finger,” he said. “We’ve got to get together as a team, we got to come closer and we’ve just got to do the right things. We’ve just got to practice a little bit better, I’m not saying practice was bad, we’ve just got to watch a little extra film here and there and tweak some things and just play better. You know, I can sit up here and talk all day about yadda yadda yadda, but at the end of the day we just got to go produce, you know, talk less and play more.”
We’ve all seen this movie before, a Patriots defense wilting down the stretch. See 2019 for a reference.
This was supposed to be different.
Christian Barmore was the steal of the draft. The rookie defensive lineman (2 tackles Sunday) has either run out of gas or at least slowed to a crawl in the past couple weeks.
During the seven-game streak, talk of Kyle Dugger and the Pro Bowl emanated from Foxborough. What was he doing when the legendary Isaiah McKenzie was allowed to toy with Myles Bryant to the tune of 11 catches for 125 yards and a TD?
Entering the game, McKenzie had 7 catches for 38 yards on the season.
(Adam Richins for BSJ)
The saddest part of all? The Bills were a mix of varsity and JV players out there. Cole Beasley and Gabriel Davis sat this one out due to Covid-19 issues. And as sharp as Allen looked at times on Sunday, Buffalo left more than a handful of plays on the field.
McCourty has been around for a dozen years here. He has three Super Bowl rings and carries the accompanying cache with him into the locker room on a daily basis.
He alone can’t provide all the answers, but he can offer at least a road map to the solution.
"It didn't feel like we did anything well enough. We only seem to get stops in the red area. We didn't get any stops to give the offense field position. It was just overall not good enough,” the captain said.
“It's down to two games left. Starting with Jacksonville, preparing, doing everything we have to. Putting everything into it and winning that game. I don't know how. I don't know what it will look like but it's that time of year to find a way to win.”