Wrapping up the Tennessee Titans Game - a Few Thoughts

Pats continued to impress Sunday with a 31-13 win in Head Coach Mike Vrabel's old team's home stadium. I have heard enough nonsense from opposing fans that the Patriots aren't that good and are only where they are because of their schedule. I'll accept that the schedule is pretty nice but last year's team wouldn't have 5 wins on the board at this stage. So it's a combination of nice schedule plus a much better, more capable football team. 

Drake Maye is consistently outdoing expectations. Sunday he tied a certain Tom Brady (2007) for most games of at least 200 passing yards, a 135 passer rating, and 2 passing TDs in a season with four. He might just be a pretty good QB, who knows. The easier schedule, I believe, is a blessing for the second year QB, who is still learning his trade as an NFL-caliber starting quarterback. It's hard enough to learn in this league and develop through making mistakes without having to deal with your confidence taking a beating weekly. Countless many promising young QBs are out of the league in a few seasons because they were in situations where they had to be near perfect to take up the slack of being on a poor team. Drake can learn and make mistakes (although, he isn't making many) and not have it cost the team often. Drake Maye threw for 222 yards, 91% completion rate completing 21/23 passes, and threw two TDs and no interceptions. A near perfect day for the young QB. Honourable mention to Joshua Dobbs who kept the drive going while Maye was in the blue tent being evaluated for a concussion. While we are on that subject, Drake has to be careful with those hits, he's no good to us if he's medically uncleared to play and the NFL is getting stricter on head-related injuries. 

Rhamondre Stevenson - What can I say? Is he turning a corner? 88 yards rushing and a TD, no fumbles, but his play has looked so much better in the last few weeks. With Gibson out and Henderson not firing yet, Mondre's productivity is vital for the offense. He's a key piece in helping maintain some balance in the offense. 

K'Lavon Chaisson had an excellent game with a recovered fumble for a TD, two sacks, and terrorised the Tennessee offensive line all day. This brings his total sacks on the season to 4.5 and now puts him in second for total sacks on the team behind Landry. His fumble recovery which put us up 31-13 pretty much guaranteed the win for the Pats. Massive day for the edge rusher. 

The Pats are the seventh worst team in the league for conceding penalty yards, with 447 yards going against them in their seven games played. They rank third in total number of penalties against them with 59. It's hard to win consistently in this league without having to make up so much yardage just to get back to where you started after being penalised. I know Vrabel and the staff knows this but we have to clean that up, because the better teams, and if we make the playoffs, will feast on the indiscipline like a pack of starving wolves. 

I'm going to give props to Bob Kraft. It would have been easy to protect your ego and refuse to swallow your pride to continuing with Mayo and further burying the team into irrelevance. Instead, he made the difficult decision to fire a guy he obviously has a lot of respect for and likes and do what is best for the football team. The move to hire Vrabel alone pretty much returned the organization to relevance. People give Kraft a lot of shit, and some of it is fair, but people aren't so quick to commend him when he makes the right call. I'm doing it now. Cheers to Mr Kraft. 

The defense has rediscovered the classic bend don't break defense of years ago with people teams rack up big yardage but forcing them to settle for field goals over touchdowns. That's positive but like the penalties, the better teams will take advantage and score in the red zone. Don't present them with that opportunity. There are a number of players chipping in with big performances - Barmore, Landry, Chaisson, Williams, and Spillane just to name a few. The unit is working well together. Resilience to hang in there when things aren't going according to plan early on and keep playing for each other after poor play and mistakes. Shut out Tennessee in the second half which really shows that this unit can play well when they need to.