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Among the things I discovered watching this game is how my TV can record the games.
I wasn't sure that I would get back in time to see the stat of the game, so I decided to record it. I recently discovered I could do that with my remote. So even while I missed most of the first half I got a chance to watch it after the game as well as go over the plays several times (plus skip all the commercials.
It is a little embarrassing to admit to something most of you probably take for granted, but while I think of myself as someone who is computer literate, my cell phone is for taking and receiving calls and changing channels on my remote is high technology. So clearly you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. But lets talk about the game.
General thoughts
There were several Key stat lines that stood out. 1. And the most important was: 4 TO's that resulted in 24 points. Without those TO's this obviously would have been a much different game. So as much as I LOVE the fact that we are now starting to win that key stat, it is something that you can't always count on to save your bacon. Sometimes you don't get the bounce so the fumble gets recovered by the offense. Sometimes the ball isn't under thrown or the tip doesn't go to your guy. 2. 3 TDs in 5 attempts in the red zone. Not great, but SOOOOO much better than last week. To put in perspective I heard a stat during the start of the KC/Bills game which stated KC was 19 out of 23 in the red zone. INSANE numbers. I don't know exactly where we stand in that important stat, BUT I sure its near the bottom of the league....still.
As I watched a game that we were clearly in control of, I also saw how precarious even double digit leads are in this game. The onside kick for example. We were VERY lucky the guy whose feet were out of bounds touched the ball first, because if he hadn't Cleveland would have recovered it. Granted it was correctly called, BUT the Pats 18 point lead that was now 9 would have looked very scary as the momentum had changed drastically.
As an aside: I LOVED how the Browns kicker kicked that ball. Standard protocol has the kicker kick the top of the ball which tends to go end over end and then pop up, which ideally gives the KO team a shot at the ball on the pop up. HOWEVER teams in those situations have "hands" guys on the field to cleanly catch the "pop up" So that why only 1 onside kick has succeeded this season. In this case the Kicker "skittered" the ball so the points of the ball were spinning parallel to the ground making it VERY difficult for the front line to field. None of the Pats front line guys seemed to want to take a stab at it. I'd love to see the Pats use that method when WE are in the position.
FYI - It occurred to me that the Pats have had only 2 home games so far, compared to Miami who has had 4. That will come in handy as we start to get more home games. BTW- I think Miami and Tampa have the built in unfair home field advantage in September. More difficult than the supposed home field advantage that we get in December.
Speaking of home field advantage, half the teams in the league will get an extra home game every year. The Pats get 8 this year, but before you get all pissed and righteous like I did when I noticed the extra away game. Remember the Pat GOT 9 home games last year. So I guess or rather hope that means it will alternate every other year.
I thought Miles Garrett had a Great game. He was impactful with 2 sacks and a forced fumble to go with 5 total tackles. He played in constant pain and was a warrior out there. The Pats, for the most part had great protection for Zappe (2 sacks, 2 QB hits compared with 4 and 8 vs Jacobi) so a great majority of that hard pressure came from Garrett.
3-3 and we are dead last in the AFCE, which will now be known as the AFC BEAST a division we still have to play 5 more times
OFFENSE - General- 304 yds passing was well beyond my expectations, But when I look at the box score the thing that popped out to me was the fact we had FIVE offensive plays that were 25 yds and over. Most drives that are more than 60 yds NEED a 20+ yd play to succeed. Drives that take more than 10 plays are HARD to complete. A penalty, a drop, a play for a loss, are all things that kill long drives. Scoring drives have to have at least one"chunk" play. That may sound strange for a fan of team that PERSONIFIED long slow drives, but its true.
My second general offensive thought was CHRIST there were a lot of offensive penalties I think we had 11, if you don't counts the one we took on purpose on a punt. I blame the Browns' crowd for some of those. They were VERY loud. I'm guessing that the Pats might have been using a silent count, which can be harder with a rookie QB. The Pats had 92 yds in penalties, a number that will usually cause you to lose games. It helped that the Browns had 73 yds. I'm hoping that a home crowd will help eliminate a majority of those mistakes.
QB - My initial impression while I was watching the game live was that Zappe was doing a good job hitting the wide open receivers. When I watched the game again I saw about 5 really good throws into tight windows. I'm thinking about that Parker catch on the sideline. QB's NEED to have receivers who can make that kind of 50-50 ball. Great throw, better catch. The throw that impressed me the most was the TD to Thornton. NOT his first target, he bought time and threw a really tough throw in a tight window to the rookie who was just breaking open. Very important play at a very important time.
Now the elephant in the room becomes now Mac or Bailey, assuming Mac is healthy. I still would rather run with Mac. Bailey is a nice shiny penny that everyone wants, but Mac stood the test time of last season. Again what I mentioned last week about high ankle sprains still stands. Now that we look to have a capable QB to play against a bad Bears team, we can afford to wait if Mac is at all limited in practice this week. We shall see. At least the media will have something to talk about. Let the speculation begin.
OL - The Pats managed 96 yds of rushing this week against a team that had a great deal of trouble stopping the run. If you look quickly at the stats that showed Stevenson with 76 yds on 19 carries for a respectable 4ypc. However if you take away his 31 yd TD run, he only averaged 2.5ypc for his other 18 carries. That's NOT going to be good enough against better defenses. We need more consistent plus yardage on runs and that needs to have better blocking More push up front. The kind of push that we saw on that 8 yd TD run at the end of the game.
All that being said, the Browns were playing 8 man fronts on running downs all game. It looked like 4-4 with cover 3 over the top. That is very hard to run against. They usually wind up with one man being unblocked. When we went heavy they had 9 man fronts. One reason Henry was so wide open on his TD pass.. I would like to see more play action passes, especially with the QB under C and more boots. You HAVE to make defenses pay for running 8 man fronts.
OTOH, the pass protection overall was excellent. 2 sacks and just 2 QB hits on 34 attempts is very good. And on the last sack by Garrett late in the game, I thought Zappe could have avoid it, and he almost did, but he was a bit late stepping up. There must have been VERY good pass blocking on the interior since it seemed Zappe few successful interior pass rushes. Most of the time Zappe always had room to step up. Good on - Strange, Andrews and Owenu.
RB - Stevenson is really good. that outside cut he made on his TD run was Sanders-esque. He turned a 6 yd gain into a 31 yd TD. Even with his 2,5 yd average on the rest of his runs, he didn't miss any opportunities and got what was there every time. Nice to see Strong and Harris get bloodied. We really need one or the other to be at least somewhat productive until DHarris comes back.
TE's - That 50 yd run by Smith was what we hoped would be a regular happening when he was signed. Henry was again what we saw last season, with 4 catches. He also had the most targets with 7. So we got 124 yds from the 2 TE's today. Smith with only 2 targets needs to see the ball more. Maybe some screens or slants
WR's - I thought this was going to be a big game for Bourne before he got hurt. I hope it isn't long term. Otherwise the WR's performed admirably with Parker showing he can make the tough catch. I'd like to see him become more of a factor in the red zone. He, Smith and Henry SHOULD be TD machines in the red zone.. We shall see if that continues to improve. I was happy to see 3 guys with catches over 25 yds. I thought the WR corps was going to be more than able this year. Thornton got a lot of run this game. Interesting to see him be used NOT as a deep threat, but more of a precision route runner. I'm very happy to see what he's done thus far, but I hope next week see get to see some of that explosive speed out of him, which might answer the question, "Does he have explosive speed?"
DEFENSE- Well I guess we should be bemoaning the defense because they finally gave up a TD. breaking a 7 quarter streak of not allowing one. But the most important impression I got this week was just how TIGHT the secondary was in their coverage ALL game. Again even when a Browns receiver caught the ball they were tightly covered and had to make great catches and great throws to make them. This was especially visible on their TD drive, where a 3rd and long play vs Mjones was cover so well I expected a pick. He just slightly misjudged the ball and over ran it by a step. This kid is good enough to run with ANYONE, my only fear is his height and when he has to run against a bigger receiver like that play vs Cooper. Same went for theTD. Bryant was RIGHT in position and the ball went to the ONLY spot it could, and the receiver did a great job of getting his feet inbounds. You don't blame your guys, you just have to tip your cap.
Front 7- DL and LB's played very tough against the best run game in the league. Out of context the stats will look better than they really were. The Pats only allowed 70 total yds rushing against a team that was averaging over TWICE that per game. Here's were the context comes in. Chubb DID average 4.7 ypc but his impact was almost non-existent because he only got just 12 carries because the Browns got behind by over 2 TD by the end of the 3rd quarter, to the point were Chubb became a non-factor. It really helps your run game when a great run team only runs it 18 times all game.
Judon didn't have a sack, but I thought he played a very impactful game putting pressure on Brissett and a rock in the run game. 5 games in and he's still going strong.
We really need to do a reset on our expectations concerning Detrick Wise. He has been just fantastic this year. He has gone from the guy who was a rotational DLman who you hoped would kill you when he was in their. After today he has 5 sacks matching his high he had in his rookie year. I'll bet that no one has played more snaps on the DL than Wise and I'll bet its by a lot. STILL his motor doesn't seem to run down. The fact I love about him is that most of his pressures come from what I call 2nd effort rushes. Few great moves, or stunts designed to free him, but most for just working hard and out working the OLman after the initial contact. The guy just doesn't give up
A nice word here for Godcheaux - He got his first sack of the year and it was HIS pressure and hand in Brissett's face that cause the fumble when Jacobi tried to reset his passing angle to avoid having Devon block the pass. He was also one of the guys who stuffed Brissett on that QB sneak.
CDavis not only had a fumble recovery he also got to show us the best big play dance I've seen in a long while. I needed to see that, especially after seeing that HORRIBLE TD dance, Thornton put us through. Too long Tyquan and kind of icky.
VERY worried about Barmore's knee. Not the fact that he hurt it, but the fact it was the one that's been bothering him most of the season. Maybe THAT's why he's been less explosive so far this season. Now I read a report that he was on the field in his uniform in the 2nd half, BUT......
I'll be interested in seeing how many snaps Sam Roberts got. I thought I saw Daniel Ekuele on the field a lot too. I thought Daniel made a couple of decent rushes to flush Brissett and had 3 tackles including one for a loss. Be interesting to see the snap chart list when it comes out. We may have to see more of these guys if Barmore and Guy are out for the next few weeks.
DB's - Again my constant impression when the other team throws the ball is there is CONSISTENTLY close coverage on most every pass, AND when a pass is caught the YAC is hard to get. It seems all our DB's are also excellent tacklers. The Pats seemed to use a LOT of man coverages, especially underneath to make the short throws Jacobi likes to throw harder to make. Both our Jones seem to be glued to their men, Cooper who all the WR nerds would be drooling over as "a true #1 receiver" had just 4 catches on TWELVE targets for just 44 yds and that GREAT catch for their TD on 4th down
I also liked the fact that while I thought Mills got the calla majority of the time with Cooper. Steve/Jerad weren't afraid to put J Jones MJones or MBryant on him as well. While I'm sure there will be the chorus that will howl about MBryant "giving up" the TD; I thought he had pretty good coverage on the play. I have a soft spot for him, because I see a bit of myself in him. I played just one year as DB, actually my last year playing. I was NOT a good pass defender, but not because I couldn't run with the guy I was supposed to cover (mostly TE's and RB's) but because I didn't have the elite athleticism to make the minor adjustments in mid-air to put myself in the BEST position to defend the pass. Unfortunately for me a lot of the RB's and TE's DID have that ability. So basically I'd be right there, they'd jump up, I'd jump up, they'd catch the ball and I'd tackle them. Now Miles Bryant is WAY better athlete than I am, but when I saw him on that TD play I saw myself. Right THERE to make a play, but not quite able to get my body into a position to actually do it. Now Bryant has time to get better at it, because even if the chorus doesn't believe it I on the other hand was in a classroom the next week. He's better this year than last year
I wasn't sure that I would get back in time to see the stat of the game, so I decided to record it. I recently discovered I could do that with my remote. So even while I missed most of the first half I got a chance to watch it after the game as well as go over the plays several times (plus skip all the commercials.
It is a little embarrassing to admit to something most of you probably take for granted, but while I think of myself as someone who is computer literate, my cell phone is for taking and receiving calls and changing channels on my remote is high technology. So clearly you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. But lets talk about the game.General thoughts
There were several Key stat lines that stood out. 1. And the most important was: 4 TO's that resulted in 24 points. Without those TO's this obviously would have been a much different game. So as much as I LOVE the fact that we are now starting to win that key stat, it is something that you can't always count on to save your bacon. Sometimes you don't get the bounce so the fumble gets recovered by the offense. Sometimes the ball isn't under thrown or the tip doesn't go to your guy. 2. 3 TDs in 5 attempts in the red zone. Not great, but SOOOOO much better than last week. To put in perspective I heard a stat during the start of the KC/Bills game which stated KC was 19 out of 23 in the red zone. INSANE numbers. I don't know exactly where we stand in that important stat, BUT I sure its near the bottom of the league....still.
As I watched a game that we were clearly in control of, I also saw how precarious even double digit leads are in this game. The onside kick for example. We were VERY lucky the guy whose feet were out of bounds touched the ball first, because if he hadn't Cleveland would have recovered it. Granted it was correctly called, BUT the Pats 18 point lead that was now 9 would have looked very scary as the momentum had changed drastically.
As an aside: I LOVED how the Browns kicker kicked that ball. Standard protocol has the kicker kick the top of the ball which tends to go end over end and then pop up, which ideally gives the KO team a shot at the ball on the pop up. HOWEVER teams in those situations have "hands" guys on the field to cleanly catch the "pop up" So that why only 1 onside kick has succeeded this season. In this case the Kicker "skittered" the ball so the points of the ball were spinning parallel to the ground making it VERY difficult for the front line to field. None of the Pats front line guys seemed to want to take a stab at it. I'd love to see the Pats use that method when WE are in the position.
FYI - It occurred to me that the Pats have had only 2 home games so far, compared to Miami who has had 4. That will come in handy as we start to get more home games. BTW- I think Miami and Tampa have the built in unfair home field advantage in September. More difficult than the supposed home field advantage that we get in December.
Speaking of home field advantage, half the teams in the league will get an extra home game every year. The Pats get 8 this year, but before you get all pissed and righteous like I did when I noticed the extra away game. Remember the Pat GOT 9 home games last year. So I guess or rather hope that means it will alternate every other year.
I thought Miles Garrett had a Great game. He was impactful with 2 sacks and a forced fumble to go with 5 total tackles. He played in constant pain and was a warrior out there. The Pats, for the most part had great protection for Zappe (2 sacks, 2 QB hits compared with 4 and 8 vs Jacobi) so a great majority of that hard pressure came from Garrett.
3-3 and we are dead last in the AFCE, which will now be known as the AFC BEAST a division we still have to play 5 more times
OFFENSE - General- 304 yds passing was well beyond my expectations, But when I look at the box score the thing that popped out to me was the fact we had FIVE offensive plays that were 25 yds and over. Most drives that are more than 60 yds NEED a 20+ yd play to succeed. Drives that take more than 10 plays are HARD to complete. A penalty, a drop, a play for a loss, are all things that kill long drives. Scoring drives have to have at least one"chunk" play. That may sound strange for a fan of team that PERSONIFIED long slow drives, but its true.
My second general offensive thought was CHRIST there were a lot of offensive penalties I think we had 11, if you don't counts the one we took on purpose on a punt. I blame the Browns' crowd for some of those. They were VERY loud. I'm guessing that the Pats might have been using a silent count, which can be harder with a rookie QB. The Pats had 92 yds in penalties, a number that will usually cause you to lose games. It helped that the Browns had 73 yds. I'm hoping that a home crowd will help eliminate a majority of those mistakes.
QB - My initial impression while I was watching the game live was that Zappe was doing a good job hitting the wide open receivers. When I watched the game again I saw about 5 really good throws into tight windows. I'm thinking about that Parker catch on the sideline. QB's NEED to have receivers who can make that kind of 50-50 ball. Great throw, better catch. The throw that impressed me the most was the TD to Thornton. NOT his first target, he bought time and threw a really tough throw in a tight window to the rookie who was just breaking open. Very important play at a very important time.
Now the elephant in the room becomes now Mac or Bailey, assuming Mac is healthy. I still would rather run with Mac. Bailey is a nice shiny penny that everyone wants, but Mac stood the test time of last season. Again what I mentioned last week about high ankle sprains still stands. Now that we look to have a capable QB to play against a bad Bears team, we can afford to wait if Mac is at all limited in practice this week. We shall see. At least the media will have something to talk about. Let the speculation begin.
OL - The Pats managed 96 yds of rushing this week against a team that had a great deal of trouble stopping the run. If you look quickly at the stats that showed Stevenson with 76 yds on 19 carries for a respectable 4ypc. However if you take away his 31 yd TD run, he only averaged 2.5ypc for his other 18 carries. That's NOT going to be good enough against better defenses. We need more consistent plus yardage on runs and that needs to have better blocking More push up front. The kind of push that we saw on that 8 yd TD run at the end of the game.
All that being said, the Browns were playing 8 man fronts on running downs all game. It looked like 4-4 with cover 3 over the top. That is very hard to run against. They usually wind up with one man being unblocked. When we went heavy they had 9 man fronts. One reason Henry was so wide open on his TD pass.. I would like to see more play action passes, especially with the QB under C and more boots. You HAVE to make defenses pay for running 8 man fronts.
OTOH, the pass protection overall was excellent. 2 sacks and just 2 QB hits on 34 attempts is very good. And on the last sack by Garrett late in the game, I thought Zappe could have avoid it, and he almost did, but he was a bit late stepping up. There must have been VERY good pass blocking on the interior since it seemed Zappe few successful interior pass rushes. Most of the time Zappe always had room to step up. Good on - Strange, Andrews and Owenu.
RB - Stevenson is really good. that outside cut he made on his TD run was Sanders-esque. He turned a 6 yd gain into a 31 yd TD. Even with his 2,5 yd average on the rest of his runs, he didn't miss any opportunities and got what was there every time. Nice to see Strong and Harris get bloodied. We really need one or the other to be at least somewhat productive until DHarris comes back.
TE's - That 50 yd run by Smith was what we hoped would be a regular happening when he was signed. Henry was again what we saw last season, with 4 catches. He also had the most targets with 7. So we got 124 yds from the 2 TE's today. Smith with only 2 targets needs to see the ball more. Maybe some screens or slants
WR's - I thought this was going to be a big game for Bourne before he got hurt. I hope it isn't long term. Otherwise the WR's performed admirably with Parker showing he can make the tough catch. I'd like to see him become more of a factor in the red zone. He, Smith and Henry SHOULD be TD machines in the red zone.. We shall see if that continues to improve. I was happy to see 3 guys with catches over 25 yds. I thought the WR corps was going to be more than able this year. Thornton got a lot of run this game. Interesting to see him be used NOT as a deep threat, but more of a precision route runner. I'm very happy to see what he's done thus far, but I hope next week see get to see some of that explosive speed out of him, which might answer the question, "Does he have explosive speed?"
DEFENSE- Well I guess we should be bemoaning the defense because they finally gave up a TD.
breaking a 7 quarter streak of not allowing one. But the most important impression I got this week was just how TIGHT the secondary was in their coverage ALL game. Again even when a Browns receiver caught the ball they were tightly covered and had to make great catches and great throws to make them. This was especially visible on their TD drive, where a 3rd and long play vs Mjones was cover so well I expected a pick. He just slightly misjudged the ball and over ran it by a step. This kid is good enough to run with ANYONE, my only fear is his height and when he has to run against a bigger receiver like that play vs Cooper. Same went for theTD. Bryant was RIGHT in position and the ball went to the ONLY spot it could, and the receiver did a great job of getting his feet inbounds. You don't blame your guys, you just have to tip your cap.Front 7- DL and LB's played very tough against the best run game in the league. Out of context the stats will look better than they really were. The Pats only allowed 70 total yds rushing against a team that was averaging over TWICE that per game. Here's were the context comes in. Chubb DID average 4.7 ypc but his impact was almost non-existent because he only got just 12 carries because the Browns got behind by over 2 TD by the end of the 3rd quarter, to the point were Chubb became a non-factor. It really helps your run game when a great run team only runs it 18 times all game.
Judon didn't have a sack, but I thought he played a very impactful game putting pressure on Brissett and a rock in the run game. 5 games in and he's still going strong.
We really need to do a reset on our expectations concerning Detrick Wise. He has been just fantastic this year. He has gone from the guy who was a rotational DLman who you hoped would kill you when he was in their. After today he has 5 sacks matching his high he had in his rookie year. I'll bet that no one has played more snaps on the DL than Wise and I'll bet its by a lot. STILL his motor doesn't seem to run down. The fact I love about him is that most of his pressures come from what I call 2nd effort rushes. Few great moves, or stunts designed to free him, but most for just working hard and out working the OLman after the initial contact. The guy just doesn't give up
A nice word here for Godcheaux - He got his first sack of the year and it was HIS pressure and hand in Brissett's face that cause the fumble when Jacobi tried to reset his passing angle to avoid having Devon block the pass. He was also one of the guys who stuffed Brissett on that QB sneak.
CDavis not only had a fumble recovery he also got to show us the best big play dance I've seen in a long while. I needed to see that, especially after seeing that HORRIBLE TD dance, Thornton put us through. Too long Tyquan and kind of icky.
VERY worried about Barmore's knee. Not the fact that he hurt it, but the fact it was the one that's been bothering him most of the season. Maybe THAT's why he's been less explosive so far this season. Now I read a report that he was on the field in his uniform in the 2nd half, BUT......
I'll be interested in seeing how many snaps Sam Roberts got. I thought I saw Daniel Ekuele on the field a lot too. I thought Daniel made a couple of decent rushes to flush Brissett and had 3 tackles including one for a loss. Be interesting to see the snap chart list when it comes out. We may have to see more of these guys if Barmore and Guy are out for the next few weeks.
DB's - Again my constant impression when the other team throws the ball is there is CONSISTENTLY close coverage on most every pass, AND when a pass is caught the YAC is hard to get. It seems all our DB's are also excellent tacklers. The Pats seemed to use a LOT of man coverages, especially underneath to make the short throws Jacobi likes to throw harder to make. Both our Jones seem to be glued to their men, Cooper who all the WR nerds would be drooling over as "a true #1 receiver" had just 4 catches on TWELVE targets for just 44 yds and that GREAT catch for their TD on 4th down
I also liked the fact that while I thought Mills got the calla majority of the time with Cooper. Steve/Jerad weren't afraid to put J Jones MJones or MBryant on him as well. While I'm sure there will be the chorus that will howl about MBryant "giving up" the TD; I thought he had pretty good coverage on the play. I have a soft spot for him, because I see a bit of myself in him. I played just one year as DB, actually my last year playing. I was NOT a good pass defender, but not because I couldn't run with the guy I was supposed to cover (mostly TE's and RB's) but because I didn't have the elite athleticism to make the minor adjustments in mid-air to put myself in the BEST position to defend the pass. Unfortunately for me a lot of the RB's and TE's DID have that ability. So basically I'd be right there, they'd jump up, I'd jump up, they'd catch the ball and I'd tackle them. Now Miles Bryant is WAY better athlete than I am, but when I saw him on that TD play I saw myself. Right THERE to make a play, but not quite able to get my body into a position to actually do it. Now Bryant has time to get better at it, because even if the chorus doesn't believe it I on the other hand was in a classroom the next week.
He's better this year than last year
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