Chung and McCourty are good young players but it's pretty stupid to think Sanchez will be making a mistake by testing either of them with Santonio Holmes. Holmes will have a big game I think, this patriots secondary is terrible. Good potential and nice young talent is there, but that doesn't change the fact that the patriots are ranked 30th? in pass defense.
The Pats pass defense is ranked pretty poorly. But I'd be careful on judging a defense on it. There are games where they are awful, and there are games where they are winning by a lot and the other team is forced to pass the ball. In fact, if you look at the two Patriots losses, neither opponent had huge passing yardage totals. The Jets had 220 yards, while the Browns had 174, so it wasn't the main reason we lost.
If you look at the top 10 worst pass defenses in terms of yardage, you'd see 3 division leaders in the Patriots (9-2), the Chiefs (7-4) and the Falcons (9-2). You could also add Jacksonville (6-5) and Seattle (5-6) to the list as they are somehow tied for the division lead, but I think that's ridiculous The Chiefs have one of the best young secondaries in football with Flowers and Berry, and if you look at highest yards per attempt, the Chiefs are down the list at 19. The Pats lead the league in passing yards given up, but rank only 9th-worst in yards per attempt, still not great, but not the worst as many would believe.
In week 1, we gave up only 130 yards to the Bengals on 19 attempts in the first half on the way to blowing them out 24-3, then in garbage time, Palmer throws 31 more times for 215 yards. The yards per attempt were similar in both halfs, but game situation forced him to throw the ball way more.
Against Pittsburgh, we held Big Ben to only 123 yards passing going into the 4th quarter down 23-3 before exploding for 264 yards in garbage time. Against San Diego, Rivers had 336 yards passing against us, 193 yards in the first 3 quarters and 143 in the final quarter down 20-3.
I'm not saying the pass defense is spectacular, but a lot of cheap yards have been thrown on at the end simply because we've had some big leads. They're not a top-10 secondary yet, but they're closer to the middle of the pack than the bottom of the list.
* Note * All calculations above done manually before my second coffee so there's probably a margin of error of +/- 10 yards, but you get the point
