What is the story about?
Well that sucked.
After a Week 2 that saw them get their first win and look fairly stifling on defense against a Steelers team that just hung 30 on the Cincinnati Bengals, the Patriots went down to Jacksonville and laid an absolute egg. Just a listless, lifeless, lame performance all around.
It’s still early in the season, I know. But yikes.
- Yesterday saw the entire Northeast blanketed with rain, wind, and overall nastiness as the Patriots enjoyed a balmy, sunny game down in Florida. There was once a time when I would have lamented the fact that New England wasn’t playing at home, because I would have been at the game in a cheap poncho while doing my absolute best to get as much liquid down my gullet as I was getting all over my body. But I have long since aged out of that nonsense, and had (what was supposed to be) a very nice afternoon on the couch in my jammies with the first fire of the season coupled with the first nut brown ale of autumn. A little slice of heaven.
- Something else that comes with getting older: the realization that summer is wildly overrated. Everywhere is crowded, everything is expensive, and there’s all this pressure to really live it up between Memorial Day and Labor Day, as if there aren’t any other opportunities to be happy the other nine months of the year. Well I say nuts to that. Give me cooler weather, crisp nights, the smell of leaves and woodsmoke in the air, delicious beers, open windows, and all the sports back on TV. Not to mention a significantly lower electricity bill for those of us who may or may not be married to a woman who may or may not insist on sleeping in full pajamas with a down quilt on no matter the outside temperature and thus may or may not blast the AC at borderline-unholy temperatures.
- And “borderline-unholy” is as good enough a phrase as any to describe some of the things that came out of my mouth while I was watching that game.
- It wouldn’t be overly hard to chalk this one up as just one of those games. Every team has games like this where nothing seems to go right. Bad penalties, lame turnovers, missed kicks, inaccurate throws, poor tackling, lackluster play-calling… it happens. Brady and Belichick had more than a handful of games like that. And it’s easy to point out that if a few plays had gone differently — a made FG, a Drake Maye TD run not called back from holding, a little less air under a pass — we could be singing a different tune this morning. But given what we’ve seen through three weeks thus far, with an offense that has two TDs on a long run and a DPI-induced goal-to-go, it’s tough to just shrug this one off as a bump in the road.
- And it isn’t entirely on Drake Maye, but a lot of it is.
- What really has me worried right now (not to the point of panic, but the panic police are in the neighborhood and asking questions) is that maybe that shoulder injury Maye suffered last season was hidden or mismanaged and never fully healed right, and now he’s the latest RG3 or Carson Wentz who just never quite came back to his old self.
- I don’t mind physical errors. Balls slip out of hands (heh). You can trip over your own feet on occasion, a behavior that is widely gaining notoriety as “The Pop Douglas.” That happens. But we’re now seeing at least one horrendous decision per game from the quarterback that directly take points off the board.
- On the Travis Hunter pick, at absolutely no point was Efton Chism even remotely open. He was completely blanketed. The play was busted. You run out of bounds, you take the points, then you get back to work. These panic throws are just ruining everything, and I’m not sure what to do about it. The 2025 Patriots seemed to open every single game by letting their opponent march right down the field and score a TD before they actually got going. The 2026 Patriots seem to have abandoned that strategy and have instead opted for a promising drive short-circuited by an atrocious turnover.
- What he really needs is a get right game. A slump buster, if you will. Which makes me really happy that the Patriots have to go to Buffalo next week, that should be just what the doctor ordered.
- What I dislike the most, I think, is that I’m starting to get strong 2023 vibes from this team. In 2023, if the Patriots were down by seven or more at any point, that was more or less the game. They didn’t have the ability to come back from a two-score deficit. I haven’t seen anything from the 2026 team that gives me faith that they can do the same.
- And there’s no way you can sit here and say that this is all because A.J. Brown is out. He isn’t some magic fix-all that’s going to get this offense off the schneid. Unless the coaching staff built their entire system around a talented but enigmatic WR in his first year with a new team. And if that’s the case, we have much bigger problems than a QB with a bad case of the yips.
- Carlton Davis almost picked off a quick screen early in the second quarter just before Jacksonville’s first TD of the day, and I found myself remembering the time that Kyle Dugger picked off the exact same play against the Raiders a few years back. I had completely forgotten about that guy and had to look up what became of him (he plays for the Bengals in case you didn’t know or, like me, forgot he existed). Talk about a ton of upward momentum suddenly and inexplicably stopped for a guy who was slated to be a cornerstone of the team but then just kind of vanished.
- I wish that the Jags had had a 1st-and-10 inside the 20 which led to a touchdown that got called back which then became 1st-and-30 at the 40 which then became some razzle-dazzle nonsense that was a lucky break more than anything to scratching just enough yards back for the field goal attempt. Because that’s an objectively funny series of events and I would have liked to laugh at it.
- What’s going on with Kyle Williams? Where is he? Why isn’t he more involved? And if Maye so deeply trusted Stefon Diggs and Kayshon Boutte, why are they both gone?
- As I mentioned earlier, I spent this game on the couch, in my pajamas, in front of a roaring fire. And I feel like I was significantly less comfortable than Trevor Lawrence was all day. This team needs some players back, and soon.
- The defense isn’t playing poorly, per se, although they did seem to have some real tackling issues yesterday and gave up almost 140 yards on the ground. But it has to wear on a unit when your counterpart isn’t pulling their weight.
- We saw a 70-yard field goal attempt to close out the first half of this game. Cam Little had the distance, he just pulled it a little wide to the right. It’s just a matter of time before someone hits one. That means that the NFL is extremely close to presenting fans with a scenario where a touchback and one first down puts a team into scoring position.
- The sounds I have found myself making every time Drake Maye releases the ball are foreign to me.
- When Andy Borregales straight-up shanked that 38-yard attempt at the beginning of the third quarter, that was it. If you turned the TV off at that point, I don’t blame you. You didn’t miss much after that.
- I don’t think that the Jags looked overly dominant yesterday. That isn’t a knock on them at all; they did what they needed to do to win. But this wasn’t a scenario where the Jags straight up dominated the Patriots. New England just never showed up, at any level. And that might be the most troubling part.
- The good news is — and real good news this time, not the “laugh so you don’t cry” kind of stuff — after Buffalo, the Patriots enter a relatively soft (on paper, at least) part of the schedule. And outside of the Bills and the Chiefs, the entire AFC seems to be a mess of mediocrity. So things are far from over. Patriots seasons of yore are replete with early slumps that turned positive. So let’s all keep the faith.
- For now.
This is the NFL, so watch the Patriots go to Buffalo next week and win 30-6. But, man, do I find myself wishing that this game was taking place at literary any
other time than this Sunday. Buckle up.
