FOXBORO, Mass. — Offensive lineman David Andrews sat alone in the locker room with his hands on his face, silently processing what had just taken place. In what was supposed to be a chance for the Patriots to show progress against the team that had crushed them in the playoffs last season, they’d flopped with a disastrous offensive performance, once again showing that there remains a massive gap between them and the top AFC East teams.
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Andrews’ reaction highlighted the despair in what increasingly feels like a lost season, with the Patriots’ 24-10 defeat at the hands of the Bills serving as the latest low in a season with too many valleys. The stalwart center is playing through a thigh injury. The 30-year-old is one of the few remaining on this roster who remembers what things were once like in New England when anything other than a Super Bowl win was a disappointment.
Now, Andrews is left to grapple with whatever this offense is and what Thursday’s loss means for a 6-6 team that once hoped to win in the playoffs. Instead, the starting quarterback was yelling on the sideline, the offensive line was a mess and the team’s only touchdown came from a rookie defensive player.
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“Just didn’t do enough,” Bill Belichick said.
The defense wasn’t great, but that’s easier to forgive against a potent Buffalo offense. But the most pressing issue for the Patriots is the disaster this offense has become and how it has turned Mac Jones, a once-promising rookie, into a struggling second-year quarterback. A unit that a year ago ranked among the league’s top 10 now struggles just to pick up a single first down.
The most damning part of it all is how unsurprising this is. In the offseason, Belichick tapped his good buddy, Matt Patricia, who hadn’t been an offensive coach in 17 years, to lead the team’s offense. If the decision didn’t come from Belichick, it would’ve seemed ludicrous. Maybe it always should’ve been viewed that way.
Whatever the case, Belichick handed the keys of an emerging offense over to Patricia, and the subsequent crash has been hard to watch. The Patriots purposefully returned most of the same players on offense. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they figured. Former coordinator Josh McDaniels had the unit ranked sixth in the league in scoring. Now it sits at 20th. Outside of running back Rhamondre Stevenson, you could argue that every offensive player has regressed.
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It’s difficult to overstate the absurdity of Belichick’s decision. Patricia had gone 13-29-1 in nearly three seasons as a head coach. His offensive coaching resume consisted of one season as New England’s assistant offensive line coach in 2005. Yet he was the one given a play-calling job so important that more than a dozen head coaches leaguewide keep the duty for themselves.
A decision that seemed destined to fail is now — surprise! — doing just that, prompting some difficult questions going forward. How much longer can the Patriots maintain the status quo on offense? Robert Kraft said he wanted his team to win playoff games again, and now even reaching the postseason will be a long shot because of an offense that has scored just 10 points in two of the last three games.
How do you evaluate Jones when this is the offense he’s forced to run? Frustration is clearly building for the quarterback who was expected to take a big step forward this season. Patricia’s game plan Thursday night, Jones said, was to throw short passes and hope the Patriots’ playmakers would break tackles. That didn’t work, yet Patricia and company never strayed from that plan, not even when they trailed by 17 in the fourth quarter.
The Patriots are determined to chip away at a 17-point deficit four yards at a time.
— Chad Graff (@ChadGraff) December 2, 2022
Cameras caught Jones, who finished 22-of-36 passing for 195 yards and a touchdown, yelling on the sideline that the Patriots weren’t throwing it downfield enough, stuck with a “quick-game” offense that wasn’t working.
Mac Jones on this clip: "What I said was about throwing it deeper. … We kept going to the short game but I felt we needed chunk plays. … It wasn't directed at anybody. Just emotion coming out." https://t.co/g0TsuwDCgn
— Chad Graff (@ChadGraff) December 2, 2022
“What I said was about throwing it deeper,” Jones said. “In the short game, I’ve got to execute that part better, but it’s the short game that we kept going to, and … I felt like we needed chunk plays, and I shouted that out to kind of get everyone going.”
Jones said he wanted “to go down fighting” while the team’s fourth-quarter play calls resulted in a 17-play drive that ate up nearly six minutes of game time when they really needed to work more quickly down 17 points late in the fourth quarter. Jones said he wanted to be “coached harder.” He added, “We didn’t do anything good enough.”
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That’s not what you want to hear from your quarterback after a Week 13 game. It may not have been optimal, but it was excusable for this offense to get off to a slow start with a new coaching staff and new verbiage in the playbook. Mistakes were to be expected. But the calendar has flipped to December, and it has shown no improvement.
In the first half, the Patriots had a second-down play from their own 8-yard line on which they were called for both holding and intentional grounding. Then, on fourth down, they were whistled for delay of game. At the end of the half, they ran a draw play on second-and-1 with 50 seconds left, then waited too long to take a timeout. They then ran a quarterback sneak and used their final timeout before Nick Folk came up short on a 48-yard field goal. It was the type of rare in-game mismanagement that makes Belichick’s blood boil.
“I mean, in the end, we should have had a field goal at the end of the half and we ended up not getting it,” Belichick said, seemingly defending how the situation was handled.
Of course, with five games left, the season isn’t over. New England can still hope to win its next two games on the road, scratch and claw to get to 9-8 on the season, then pray that’s enough to nab the final wild-card spot.
But the offense has been bad enough to question whether that’s possible or, heck, even worthwhile. Where does the unit head now? Will Belichick continue with the status quo for five more weeks? He can’t possibly run it back with this same group next season, right? Those are questions the veteran coach is going to have to address eventually.
A fan base spoiled by the greatest quarterback of all time is now left to watch an offense being run by a former defensive coordinator. It lacks creativity, complexity and general effectiveness.
Before the season, with questions already swirling about Patricia and offensive assistant/quarterbacks coach Joe Judge, Belichick proclaimed that he was the one to blame if this didn’t work. From the outside, it was hard to fathom how his elevation of Patricia would lead to offensive success. But Belichick didn’t care. He’d been right many times before when everyone doubted him, and he thought that’s what would happen again.
But now, this broken offense and the coaching staff’s inability to fix it seem to have the Patriots headed to a fourth straight season without a playoff win.
(Photo of Mac Jones: Adam Glanzman / Getty Images)
