Final: Patriots 13, Raiders 20

FOXBOROUGH, MA - Same old, same old for the New England Patriots. The Mike Vrabel era begins with a pretty ugly loss against the Las Vegas Raiders. The Raiders had never beaten the Patriots on opening day and they had never won at Gillette Stadium. They did both today.

Both teams went 4-13 last year but the Raiders looked much improved, the Patriots did not, and closely resembled that 4-13 team. Raiders marched down the field on their first drive and scored a TD, the Patriots opening drive went nowhere and ended after a three-and-out, even after being given favourable field position. The defense finally got things going midway through the first quarter with a Carlton Davis tip ball and Jaylinn Hawkins picks Geno Smith's pass. The offense took advantage of the pick by developing a drive which resulted in a Maye to Douglas 3 yard TD in the redzone, an area of the field New England had issues with last season.

The Patriots began to show some promising play in the second quarter and looked like they potentially would go on to win the game. The defense forced the Raiders to punt in three successive drives and the offense added a field goal after Andy Borregales missed an earlier attempt at the posts. The Raiders missed a field goal of their own to close out the second quarter and the Patriots took a 10-7 lead at half time.

I stated that the Patriots had yet to come out of the locker room for the second half because their decent play was left in the first half. Drake Maye threw a poor ball which was picked off and the Raiders offense capitalized and went down the field to score a touchdown giving Vegas a 14-10 lead. The Patriots punted on every possession after except for a 44 yard Borregales field goal which proved to be a consolation score. The Raiders added two more field goals to their tally and ran out 20-13 winners.

The positives are that the game is over. Seriously, though, the defense showed some very promising moments and with Gonzalez to presumably be back for week two, one can hope that if they can get more consistent we will be tough to score against. Even today, the Raiders scored 20, that's not a huge score and you would be confident of winning games if the offense could score more. Henry and Maye connected on a few big plays. Henderson had a tough day but we never got the running game going. A lot of work to do but at least the next game is against a Miami team that looks in worse turmoil right now.