Man do I hate Thursday Night Football.
My disdain for the NFL’s decision to go for a money grab by making teams play before they’ve had a chance to fully recover or install an adequate gameplan is well documented on this site. No need to rehash any of it again. And I haven’t watched a single Thursday Night game this year – not out of protest, but I know that I’m almost guaranteed to get a crappy product.
I also don’t have Amazon Prime, but that’s neither here nor there.
On the plus side, the Patriots got the win, and while the Milton Williams injury is something to monitor, everyone got out of there mostly unscathed and can enjoy a mini-bye as the rest of the league slugs it out this weekend. Can’t ask for much more than that.
- I was never really worried about the outcome of this game; the Jets are terrible and the Patriots were at home. For the most part, all good things came out of last night. But man oh man do the Patriots need to stop spotting teams seven automatic points each and ever week.
- Their ability to cede long, effortless opening possession scoring drives knows no limits and defies all logic. The 14-play, 72-yard TD drive that ate up almost half of the first quarter might be the best offensive possession the Jets have had in the last five year. And at no point was I even remotely confident that the Patriots were going to be able to stop them. Even weirder, I wasn’t even worried about it. I knew that once they surrendered that score, they likely wouldn’t give up more than 10 points for the rest of the game. It’s just so, so weird.
- And it’s going to haunt them in a major way if they don’t figure out how to clean that up before the playoffs start. We’re 11 weeks in, so it’s reasonable to just assume it is what it is at this point. But man.
- This Patriots teams also needs to learn how to put games away when they have the chance. They could have buried the Falcons by halftime. They had a chance to blow the game open against Tampa Bay. And last night they could have kicked a late first-half field goal and then scored on the opening possession of the third quarter to put the game out of reach. They missed the FG then went three and out to start the second half. Then they were gifted one of the Jetsiest fumbles that ever Jetted to set them up on the 15, and they only came away with three points. Good teams aren’t going to fail to capitalize on stuff like that.
- Luckily, however, the Jets are not a good team, and the Patriots are. They kept it relatively simple last night, with multi-concept running packages and efficient passes to the middle tier of the defensive zones. Drake Maye had...
Pats Pulpit
