10 Things We Learned Yesterday
In no particular order, here are 10 things we learned about the Patriots in yesterday’s game, a 23-16 win over the St. Louis Rams:
1. Matt Cassel can now boast of at least one thing he has in common with Tom Brady. Yesterday marked the first time in his professional Cassel engineered a fourth-quarter comeback. Granted, it didn’t have the seismic oomph of a usual Tom Brady-led come-from-behind victory, but it’s still nice to have on the resume. With 12:25 left in the game, New England was trailing by three and the Gillette Stadium crowd was relatively flat. After Stephen Gostkowski connected with a game-tying field goal, the Patriots got the ball back and put together a seven-play, 53-yard drive that ended with a 15-yard toss to Kevin Faulk for the eventual game-winner, which helped lift New England to its third win in its last four games and into a first place tie with Buffalo in the AFC East. “We were behind in the fourth quarter, and it’s up to us to come back, and, in the face of a little adversity, to fight. And we did that as an offensive unit,” Cassel said. “Everybody stepped up, and I thought that was a big thing for this offense to prove that we can do that in those tight games, because I’m sure there are going to be a lot of those down the road.”
2. Kevin Faulk remains easy to overlook. At 5-foot-8, we’re not only talking literally here, but figuratively. In an offense with Randy Moss and Wes Welker — and, before this season, Tom Brady — it’s easy to forget about the veteran back. But he was at his do-everything best yesterday, accounting for 107 yards from scrimmage and providing an offensive spark all afternoon. With no LaMont Jordan, Sammy Morris or Laurence Maroney, he provided the bulk of the ground game with 60 yards. He caught 47 yards worth of passes (in all, he grabbed four of the seven passes Cassel threw in his direction), and hauled in the game-winner, a 15-yard reception where he deked the defender with a new trick he learned in a midweek class in pass catching with Professor Moss. “It was something I learned from Randy — not sticking your hands out too there early,” said Faulk, who ended up with a team-high 60 rushing yards and 47 receiving yards on the afternoon. “It was just a perfect throw by Matt.” It was the latest in a long line of larger-than-life performances from Faulk, who got the ultimate compliment from Patriots coach Bill Belichick when he compared him to another offensive sure thing who recently called it a career. “He has been a very dependable and consistent player. It seems like you can always count on Kevin no matter what phase of the game it is in,” Belichick said. “Whatever he can do to help us win, he’d do — mop the floors, he’d mop them. Like Troy Brown, you just can’t say enough about a guy like Kevin Faulk.”
3. They can be a bottom line way of looking at performance, but sometimes, stats are really unfair. Cassel finished 21-for-33 for 267 yards, but the score sheet doesn’t show a pair of bad drops, one from Moss and one from Welker. (Moss had a particularly bad one, having the ball go right through his hands in the end zone.) One of Cassel’s two interceptions came after Moss bobbled a pass, and the other came after Welker wiped out and simply fell down. “Those things are going to happen, where a guy falls down [or] a tipped ball happens. The main thing I thought was great for the offense was that we didn’t get discouraged,” Cassel said. “We knew the plays were there; we just didn’t make them. Then we came back and made the play when it counted at the end.” Here’s an overall look at the receiver ratio for the Patriots’ skill position players yesterday (passes thrown to against passes caught): Welker and Moss each had 11 passes thrown in their direction, and they each caught seven. (Moss ended up with a rather quiet 102 receiving yards, and Welker had 79 receiving yards.) Jabar Gaffney, Ben Watson and David Thomas were all 1-for-1 and Faulk 4-for-7. (One Cassel pass was simply thrown away.)
4. Depth in the secondary remains a concern. After an early head injury — a quaint term for a concussion — the Patriots lost starting cornerback Deltha O’Neal for much of the game, and were forced to turn to youngster Mike Richardson. (O’Neal would return at the end of the game to pick off a fourth-quarter Marc Bulger pass that ultimately closed out the contest.) Ellis Hobbs III was banged up, the victim of a shoulder injury. (“I just hit the ground kind of funny,” Hobbs said. “Too funny, actually.”) As a result, the Patriots were forced to use rookies Jonathan Wilhite and Terrence Wheatley probably more than they would have liked to in the secondary, but they made it work. “When guys go down, a lot of things happen, but Bill Belichick is the king of moving people around and putting us in a position to make plays,” said safety James Sanders. “When guys go down, others step in, and we try not to miss a beat. And for the most part, we didn’t.” Going forward, the Patriots will need all hands on deck, especially with the Colts on tap next week. “We know what kind of test that will be,” Belichick said of Indianapolis.
5. Big plays were a problem for the New England pass defense yesterday. In all, the Patriots’ pass defense yielded an average of 16.7 yards per completion, including four pass plays of 27 yards or more (35, 69, 27 and 44 yards). By way of comparison, St. Louis surrendered an average of 12.7 yards per completed pass, and New England yielded an average of 17 yards for every completed pass in the 30-10 debacle against the Chargers two weeks ago. Big plays remain an Achilles heel for the Patriots’ defense, but Hobbs doesn’t seem concerned, at least not yet. “It’s just part of the game,” Hobbs said. “Regardless of, if that was the weak part or whatever, teams are going to continue to try that. We just have to continue denying and keep playing ball. That’s what we did today, we kept playing ball. There was one play where they tried to throw a deep one on me and I came back and knocked it down. They are going to happen regardless — we just have to make plays on them.”
6. While the secondary may have taken a step back, the defensive front was able to pick up the slack with some terrific pressure on the quarterback. The defensive front came up big yesterday, with Richard Seymour in particular doing a great job. He dominated the line of scrimmage with seven tackles and one sack, as well as with four quarterback hits. Teammate Ty Warren, who had a sack of his own, said the injuries in the secondary affected the way the front three went about their business. “Typically it does in a sense, but at the same time, you just have to go out there and deal with what you have,” Warren said. “Due to some injuries and stuff, it’s realistic that maybe some schemes or things like that could change. But hopefully, everybody can get out there and get healthy. To have everybody out there — especially going into Colts game — will be a plus for us.”
7. Gary Guyton is starting to assume a larger role on the New England defense. By our very unofficial count, the young inside linebacker was on the field for 26 of New England’s 64 defensive snaps, including 16 in the fourth quarter alone. Most of the time, he rotated onto the field in third down or passing situations to replace Tedy Bruschi. Yesterday, he finished with a pair of tackles, including one for a loss, and did a nice job in coverage. As for the rest of the linebacker breakdown — again, it’s an unofficial look (we stress the fact that we haven’t watched the tape of the game yet) we’ve got it like this: Pierre Woods with five, Bruschi with 39, Jerod Mayo with 52, Mike Vrabel with 59 and Adalius Thomas with 64 snaps.
8. Stephen Gostkowski is kicking at a Pro Bowl level. We keep saying it, week after week, but his performance has been so steady and consistent it deserves repeating: Gostkowski remains the best example of someone who should feel relatively comfortable booking passage to Hawaii in February. On a breezy day yesterday, he cleanly booted three field goals from 30, 27 and 41 yards, while also adding one touchback on his five kickoffs. Gostkowski is now 16-for-17 (94 percent) this season and has made 23 of his last 24 kicks dating back to 2007. His 41-yard kick in the fourth quarter raised his career points total to 302 points, making him the seventh player in team history to score 300 or more points for the Patriots. Gostkowski’s fourth-quarter extra point raised his career total to 303 points, moving him past Ben Coates (302) for sixth place on the Patriots’ all-time scoring list.
9. The Rams are feeling much better about themselves now than they did after the first four games of the season. St. Louis, which fell to 2-5 with the loss, beat the Redskins in D.C., hammered the Cowboys at home and played very well yesterday in Foxborough. Marc Bulger looked rejuvenated, Chris Long appears to be the real deal and rookie wide receiver Donnie Avery beat the New England passing defense badly on a few occasions, coming away with a game-high 163 receiving yards. So what if they didn’t win yesterday? That doesn’t mean good things aren’t in their future. Yesterday, wide receiver Dane Looker came off the field, and as he passed a group of reporters said loudly, “If we play like that every week the rest of the year, we’ll [finish the year] 11-5.” That might be a stretch, but it’s probably not too far off, especially in the NFC West.
10. You can level a lot of charges against the 2008 Patriots, but you can’t say they’re undisciplined. The Patriots are now the least penalized team in the league. Entering yesterday’s action, they were second behind the Texans — New England had 22 penalties while Houston had just 16 penalties on the season. But the Texans were flagged seven times in their 35-6 win over the Bengals yesterday. Meanwhile, the Patriots were not penalized for any accepted penalties against St. Louis, marking the first penalty-free game in the franchise’s 731-game history. “That is something we talked about this week — we really emphasized staying away from the personal fouls, and we did that,” Belichck said. “You always want to play penalty free. That is a goal each week for every unit, and obviously, you’re not going to go through a whole season without getting a penalty. But offensively, defensively and in the kicking game before each game our goal is to play penalty free in each of those units so that’s great.” The Patriots have been called for just one penalty in a game on 13 occasions, most recently on Sept. 10, 2006 against Buffalo. New England’s penalty-free performance was the first in the NFL this season and the first for an NFL team since Seattle was not flagged for any accepted infractions against Baltimore on Dec. 23, 2007. The Patriots’ penalty-free game was the 50th such performance by an NFL team since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger.
Christopher Price has covered the Patriots for Boston Metro since 2001. His book, “The Blueprint: How the New England Patriots Beat the System to Create the Last Great NFL Superpower” is currently available from St. Martin’s Press in paperback. He can be reached at christopher.price@metro.us.
