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Monday, November 8, 2010

Patriots better get their act together

By Chad Garner
Fan Fanatic Sports Staff
Are you still shaking your head after yesterday's disgusting Patriots game?
I am, but I'm also sort of chuckling.
Not because of the loss because those always sting, but in the way that it happened.
They got humiliated.
And people were starting to believe that this New England Patriots team was the best in the NFL?
What are they thinking this morning?
Yes, the Patriots are not as bad as they played, but they're also not as good as people think they are. They are somewhere in between, and that's not a bad thing, either.
Teams in the NFL do put up stinker games, but against Cleveland? Against the rat Eric Mangini? Shouldn't have happened.
Obviously, looking back on it now, the Pats took the Browns lightly. They played like it, too.
But those Browns played like it was their Super Bowl.
If you never watched a football game in your life, you would have thought that the Browns were the elite and the Patriots were a team at the bottom of the pack.
The Pats didn't do anything right. They were severely beaten in every phase of the game, including coaching.
But defensively, they just laid a major stink bomb.
Browns QB Colt McCoy is a rookie, but the Pats made him look like an All-Pro. They didn't put pressure on him, they couldn't contain him and they paid the ultimate price.
And while most of their attention was on stopping the run, the Pats couldn't do a darn thing against bruising back Peyton Hillis (184 yards, 2 TDs). Hillis, who would destroy a brick wall if he ran into it, made the Pats defense look like a Pop Warner team. He took their will away and completely punked them.
Well, the offense wasn't much better. How out of sync does Tom Brady and his cast of receivers and tight ends look? They are not on the same page and it's showing. Perhaps the one positive is that no-huddle offense, which they should have done earlier. They at least dictated tempo and actually moved the ball down the field. And one week after praising the Law Firm, I'm back to not being a fan. He didn't run hard and was a non-factor. Nine carries for 14 yards, not going to cut it. Perhaps this team should just drop back and pass (via the no-huddle) on every down?Use the short, 3-yard pass as a run. It's worked before, maybe go back to it on a full-time basis.
Any way you slice it, Mangini and his cast of former New England assistants completely outschemed mastermind Bill Belichick and his assistants. That'll eat at Bill for a long time ...and it should.
It was a total team collapse. This is the type of loss that can linger for weeks. And now the Pats enter the meat of their schedule -- at Steelers (Sunday night 8:20 p.m.), vs. Colts, at Lions (but don't automatically chalk that up in the win column) and vs. Jets -- for the next four weeks.
The Pats have a lot of work to do, obviously. Everyone -- coaches and players -- need to elevate their game and start putting a better product on the field on a consistent basis. If things don't change quickly, the AFC East division could slip away real quickly.