The Patriots have been idle since last Thursday night’s win over the Steelers, but after being eliminated from the postseason, they at least got a little help with their draft status Monday night.
Following the Giants’ and Titans’ wins over the Packers and Dolphins respectively, New England has a little more breathing room at the top of the draft board.
After their respective wins, New York and Tennessee each sit at 5-8 with four games remaining, with the Jets among several of the teams who had four wins heading into Sunday pulling off a victory.
As it currently sits, the Patriots are tied with the Cardinals at 3-10 behind the 1-12 Panthers heading into Week 15. However, New England currently holds the edge over Arizona based on strength of schedule, which has them with the number two overall selection.
Still, how long that lasts remains to be seen. To this point, Bill Belichick’s team continues to play hard and they’ve started to finally show some signs of life on offense these last two weeks.
Whether or not they can carry that forward should be interesting to watch, as Bailey Zappe’s ascension into the starting role certainly changes things. Kansas City comes into this week having lost in frustrating fashion against the Bills to drop them to 8-5 on the season, and they’ve been a team the Patriots have played tough in recent meetings.
That Chiefs’ loss was critical because it both rejuvenated Buffalo’s (7-6) playoff hopes, while also increasing the difficulty for Kansas City’s potential road back to the Super Bowl. As it currently stands, both the Ravens (10-3) and Miami (9-4) sit ahead of them for the top seed in the Conference with four games left to play.
The Patriots last meeting against the Chiefs came in 2020 in Kansas City, which included some tough moments, including Brian Hoyer forgetting how many timeouts they had in the waning moments of the first half.
That cost the club points as they went into the locker room down just 6-3 before the Chiefs came out and put up 20 points in the second half, including 13 in the fourth quarter as the Patriots ended up on the wrong end of a 26-10 loss.
New England hasn’t played since Thursday night, and the players received some additional rest thanks to having some additional time off coming off their win over Pittsburgh.
Hopefully, that gives them an edge when they next take the field Sunday at Gillette Stadium at 1:00pm.
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Ian Logue is a Seacoast native and owner and senior writer for PatsFans.com, an independent media site covering the New England Patriots and has been running this site in one form or another since 1997.
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