Pats Pulpit
These rapidly disappearing summer weekends are incredibly precious. While there’s still technically over a month of summer left, we all know that the season lasts from Memorial Day through Labor Day, meaning we only have two more weekends until Fall starts.
And that there was no place I’d rather be yesterday than inside on a beautiful Saturday afternoon watching a meaningless football game between the New England Patriots and Minnesota Vikings goes a long way toward how excited I am for this coming NFL season. It was an up-and-down week of practices for New England, and an up-and-down game for the team overall, but everyone walked out of there unscathed and the Pats are now 2-0 on the year.
1. The question I asked last week was whether there would be any teams treating Week 2 of the preseason like the old Week 3 or whether Week 3, the new Week 4, would still be the original Week 3. Based on what we saw yesterday, Week 2 is still Week 2 and next week will be the dress rehearsal.
2. Apparently, the starters weren’t even supposed to see any time yesterday, but after a rocky week of practices Mike Vrabel decided they needed some more reps. So we got ourselves some Patriots 1s vs some Vikings 2s and 3s in the Mike Felger dream scenario of a no-win situation. If the starters looked good, who cares, if they looked bad, they got shut down by backups and the season is already over.
3. As for how they looked… if I had to give the starters a grade yesterday, it would obviously be an Incomplete. But that’s a copout, so I’m going to go ahead and give the grade that I used to throw myself a party for on the rare occasions I reached that particular height: B-.
4. I thought that Drake Maye looked great in terms of pocket mobility and extending plays with his legs, highlighted by the 20-yard throw to Mack Hollins that represented the best throw of the preseason thus far. He also seemed to either misread a few routes or wasn’t on the same page with his guys, as he put some passes in tough spots. Since we’re firmly in the “if your guys look bad, no need to worry it’s just preseason” portion of the NFL calendar, we can all chalk it up to whichever of the following cliches best suits your mania:
5. Additionally, the starting O-line of Campbell/Brown/Bradbury/Onwenu/Bryant seemed to do their best to duplicate my strategy as a lover: serviceable but unspectacular. The bulk of the success the running backs had seemed to come from fighting through tackles as opposed to exploiting well-blocked gaps.
6. That said, people are as down on...
