Tuesday Afternoon Patriots Notes - Haynesworth 'Day-to-Day', No Maurice Jones-Drew for the Jaguars, and More
Some interesting news and notes so far on this Tuesday.
Shalise Manza Young of the Boston Globe has a quick entry from Bill Belichick's press conference, with the coach telling reporters that Albert Haynesworth is "day to day" after missing the last three practices.
The defensive tackle, who has not practiced in three days and is not on the field at the start of today's practice, is "in the day-to-day category. Hopefully he'll be out there in a day, a matter of days...Unfortunately we have a number of players in that category."
As we get set for Thursday night's game against the Jaguars, Tania Ganguli of Jacksonville.com reports that quarterback Blaine Gabbert will get the start for Jacksonville, while Aaron Kampman and Maurice Jones-Drew are both expected to miss the first preseason contest.
Mike Reiss has his mailbag for this afternoon, and answers some interesting questions. As we've watched all kinds of different player transactions recently, Reiss feels that the acquisitions are part of one big experiment, and that head coach Bill Belichick has three weeks to figure it all out.
I posted this earlier, but for anyone who missed it - it's still worth repeating. Some people had asked if the team was planning to come up with something on their uniform to honor Myra Kraft, who recently passed away after a valiant battle with cancer. ESPN reported this morning that they'll indeed honor her with a patch on their jerseys this season, which can be seen here. It's navy blue with the initials MHK embroidered on it.
Christopher Gasper of Boston.com has a column he posted a little while ago, and writes that Belichick is going for broke this season judging by the recent moves we've seen them make.
ESPN's John Clayton was on WEEI.com this morning, talking about some of the recent transactions, and said that Patriots defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth was a strong addition, and said that the veteran is "unblockable" when he wants to be.
"When he wants to be, he's unblockable," said the ESPN analyst. "Even go back to what you saw his first year in Washington. Now that wasn't a great Washington team. It was pretty average, but what they had to do was put two or three guys on him and so what it ended up doing was taking their two defensive ends, Andre Carter - who of course will be playing with Albert again - and the rookie at the time Brian Orakpo, and put them in double-digit sack seasons. This is from a team, I think if I'm not mistaken, that may have had like 13-17 sacks the year before. Well, they had 20 from the guys playing outside Albert."Albert draws a lot of attention, and he can physically dominate people and also too he can get push on the quarterback and try to get through those blockers. So I think what you're going to see is more of that and less what you saw last year."
Clayton also said during the interview that the team is bringing in guys who have won and have had success, and they should be strong additions to the team this season.
"I think what they're bringing in are guys that have won, guys that have had success, guys that they know can do it and also addressing needs," Clayton said. "You know, once they made the decision with Randy Moss almost talking himself off the roster, they needed one more outside guy and now they get him in Chad Ochocinco. I think that for years after not finding that right rushing outside linebacker, they thought, "Right, how do we do it? Let's build up the defensive line in a 4-3." You look at the guys. How many Pro Bowls? How many great games have been played in all those defensive linemen that they acquired? What it also does is frees up Albert Haynesworth to maybe only 35-40 plays per game to be that dominant type of player. So I really like a lot of the things they're doing and I think it could very well translate into the postseason."
And finally NFL legend Jerry Rice weighs in with his thoughts on Moss in an interview on WEEI, calling the former receiver "Lazy" among some other thoughts. You can here his comments via this link.
One final note, Karen Guregian of the Boston Herald reports that Rob Gronkowksi and Dan Connolly (and Haynesworth) are all out of practice. We'll have another entry later on following the team's afternoon session with more at the end of the day.
