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-Meanwhile, the Patriots have fared astronomically well against sub-.500 teams under Belichick, which should be a reason why the "trap game" argument should be hot air by now. My research may be off slightly, but just running down the games from profootballreference, I believe the Pats are 53-4 since 2003 against sub-.500 teams (that's the final record, not at the time of the game.) Three of those losses were to Miami, and the other was the infamous opener in 2003 to Buffalo. You could argue that their incredible consistency in dispatching bad teams is actually the reason for their record-setting streaks and winning pct over the last decade, even more so than beating good ones.
-So you can talk about all the matchups and possibilities, but in the end, I see this as an easy call. In 53 of 57 games, the Pats have taken out the garbage successfully, and they haven't lost to a sub-.500 besides Miami since the first game seven years ago. During all of these 50+ games it's the same story every week: watch out for this guy, Pats will be overconfident, the other team will be playing with nothing to lose, the other team is better than we think, etc. etc. Belichick prepares his team for one game at a time, and he loses extremely rarely when he has a big talent advantage.
Prediction: The Patriots offense might continue to struggle again early on, so I don't expect a 2007-esque woodshed game. However, I expect the Patriots to easily cover the 4 point spread. This game will be ugly, as Belichick/Mangini matchups typically are, with neither coach wanting to look bad. The Browns will play conservatively, and so will the Patriots. Patriots 24, Browns 13.
We're favoured in this game for a reason; we're the better team. We should win. But to say we'll win easily is a completely different thing.
Yes, we've beaten a lot of sub-500 teams, but very few of those wins were easy. Last year, we played 5 games against sub-500 teams and only blew out one of them (Tampa). We split with Miami, beating them by 10 and losing to them, and beat Buffalo twice by a combined 8 points.
In 2008, Cassel played. In 2007, we blew out most teams, even good ones. But as we transition back to old-school Patriots football, it's important to remember that those good ol' days weren't filled with many easy wins. If we look at the period where we won our Super Bowls (2001 to 2004), you'll see that there were plenty of close games even against the sub-500 teams.
Even if you look only at the 3 Super Bowl winning years, you find a lot of close games. Below are the results of our games vs. sub-500 teams during our SB years:
2004
Arizona by 11
Miami by 14
Chiefs by 8
Browns by 27
Loss to Dolphins by 1
49ers by 14
2003
Loss to Buffalo by 31
Jets by 7
Loss to Redskins by 3
Giants by 11
Cleveland by 6
Houston by 3
Jacksonville by 14
Jets by 5
Bills by 31
2001
Loss to Bengals by 6
Indy by 31
San Diego by 3
Atlanta by 14
Buffalo by 10
Saints by 17
Browns by 11
Bills by 3
Carolina by 32
That's 4 losses to 4 different teams out of 24 games vs. sub-500 teams, or 16% of those games vs. our Super Bowl teams. During those 3 years, we only lost 9 total games, and 4 of them were to sub-500 teams.
Lets say a blowout is more than 2 possessions. A close game is 1 possession. Competitive is in-between. You could say 4 of those games were "easy" games or blowouts.
7 games were within 1 possession, with the other 9 falling into the competitive range. That's at least 11 games that were either lost or decided by a possession or less against a sub-500 team.
As for this year's Pats, we beat Cincinnati by 14, Buffalo by 8, San Diego by 3, and Minnesota by 10. The Cincy game looks a lot better because of a big second half from the Bungles, but the other 3 games were very competitive and easily could have been losses.
At 6-1, we deserve to be favoured. But we don't deserve to expect to beat anyone easily.