PatsPropaganda

An Independent Patriots Blog

ja'whaun bentley

Pats Bring Back Jamie Collins

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The Patriots trade of Jamie Collins was one of the most shocking moves of Bill Belichick’s storied tenure. At that point in the 2016 season the Patriots defense was pretty bad.

No one ever thought they’d trade someone like Collins who after 2014 and 2015 was one of the most well-respected young linebackers in the league. In tandem with Dont’a Hightower they were a lethal duo leading the team to Super Bowl 49’s title.

Collins seemed like the perfect athletic linebacker for today’s game. Still he was exposed in coverage more than we’d like to admit. The 2015 AFC Championship was a low point for him and it carried over into the 2016 season.

He was a dynamic player, but prone to mental lapses that eventually caught up with him. So what’s different now that they’re bringing him back?

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Pats Posits: All Aboard the Latest and Greatest Pats Hype Train!

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Here we are once again in early December and the Patriots look like they’re firing on all cylinders.

The Pats played an excellent game of team defense and moved the ball seemingly at will for most of the game, and with the Steelers losing, they now have an inside track on the 2nd seed at least. Homefield is everything at this point. Never has there been a more home manic-road depressive Patriots team than 2018’s.

With four games to go and trips to Miami and Pittsburgh next up, the Patriots will get what they deserve in the playoffs. If they overcome their road woes in two tough places to play then hold serve at home against the Bills and Jets, they’ll prove legitimate Super Bowl contenders and might not have to travel from Foxboro.

Kansas City faces a tough schedule — Ravens, Chargers, at Seahawks and Raiders. Whoever slips will have to hit the road. The race to the finish line will be close.

For now, we enjoy a beautiful victory over the Vikings.

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Pats Posits: Maybe the Pats are Just Bored

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It was nice to get a chance to catch our breath over the bye week and enjoy some non-Pats-stressed football. What seems clear is that the parity of last season has extended into 2018. It’s good for the league that so many games were close with the exception of just a couple blowouts which please the fantasy crowd.

After the Chiefs, Saints and Rams it’s a whole lot of up and down teams that could win or lose on any given Sunday. The Pats are definitely in that lower tier but part of me has to wonder if maybe the Patriots Football Machine is just having a little trouble getting up for non-big games. Especially on the road. At home against good teams, the Patriots have looked like one of the most solid teams in the league.

How you play on the road and against supposed inferior competition does say a lot about the complexion of your team, but I don’t know, maybe this team is just having as hard a time getting psyched up to play all our old friends at the Titans or Lions as I do. And a September Super Bowl in Florida? Whatever. Wake me up for KC, Aaron Rodgers, Big Ben and playoff games.

This is a transition year on offense and injuries have altered things a bit. Defensively, there aren’t any excuses. They’ve played pretty good at home and on the road they’ve looked like a different defense. The struggles on special teams, resulting in field position losses, have been silent killers.

We’ll get a small idea whether or not they can finally just turn it on this weekend. Yeah, the Jets have struggled but so has Buffalo and they hung with these road Pats. New England will get no credit for putting down the Jets, especially if their offense sputters again, but a solid road win to start the post-Thanksgiving push would be nice.

There’s a good team inside these 2018 Patriots, but their dueling personalities have drawn skepticism about their Super Bowl chances. All I know is they’ll keep at it, and go down swinging no matter what. It’s just what they do, even when they don’t win.

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Adding Injury to Insult: Burkhead and Bentley to IR

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Remember yesterday when I dove into the All-22 and came away with one headline silver lining which was Ja’whaun Bentley looked really good in places, including his interception where he ran like we haven’t seen a linebacker run since the days of Jamie Collins. Welp, today Bentley along with Rex Burkhead were sent to IR.

It appears that Bentley was injured on the final play of the Lions game, adding another level of gut-punch to a season that has been not much fun for the past two weeks.


With the lack of speed already glaring in the middle of the field, losing Bentley like this is devastating. Putting more pressure on Hightower, Roberts and Van Noy, a trio that doesn’t need more pressure put on them. Of every defensive player, I’m not sure there’s a player I’d want to lose less. Maybe Trey Flowers but just about anyone else, including Hightower, would be less depressing, which I’d never thought I’d write as recently as 10 days ago but here we are.

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Film Review: Finding Some Silver Linings

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I was surprised that watching the All-22 of the Patriots loss to the Lions made me feel a lot better about the Patriots chances of turning the season around from the 1-2 start. This is almost always the case, because you get a sense of how close the Pats were on many plays that went against them.

It’s small consolation, but it’s a clear illustration that all is not lost and that a 23-10 loss isn’t the worst thing to ever happen to a football team even if it was the second week in a row the Pats didn’t really show up.

I had to take this one in as a total experience, not a specific play by play, drive by drive breakdown but I came away with some general thoughts that were much different than what I came away with as I depressingly crawled into bed close to midnight on Sunday.

The first good takeaway is the Ja’whaun Bentley is a keeper. Yes, he had mistakes that took away from his overall impressive play, but this is the kind of player the Patriots defense needs badly and he should only continue to improve. His reaction speed is so impressive, better I dare say than any other linebacker on the roster. Watching his interception and he sticks with his receiver like glue and effortlessly makes the pick.

I don’t know where the Patriots defense is headed, but I’m pretty positive that Bentley is going to be a building block.

The other good guy I’ll mention is Dietrich Wise, who appears to still be viewed mostly as a pass rusher at this point, but he brings great energy and is one of the only consistently disruptive players up front. Bentley and Wise are the future on defense.

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Pats Posits: This Feels Different

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The Patriots have had plenty of September stinkers over the years where an average-to-terrible team goes toe-to-toe with them and either flames out right at the end or dispatches the Patriots, and the punditry gleefully jumps to pronounce the dynasty dead.

Usually, in those games, it was just a case of a good football team playing bad football and the Pats would snap out of it with a statement win near the end of the month and then they’d cruise into the playoffs, constantly getting better and fighting through the kind of injuries that would derail every other team.

I’ve spent the early parts of those seasons being level-headed, reminding everyone how hard it is to win in the NFL, how amazing it was that we just took for granted that the Pats had been doing it for going on two decades. Because it was always clear to me that those Patriots teams that sputtered in September were far better than they looked on the field. I still believed that last week after the perfect storm loss to Jacksonville, but now, after an all-around flat performance in Detroit, even I’m starting to wonder if this is finally the year the Patriots just don’t have it.

Boil it down and we’re seeing a team that lost some key clutch playmakers while none of the replacements have stepped up. Aside from Dietrich Wise, no other young player has shown anything. Coming off the Jags loss it was easy to just assume the Pats would bounce back, but that meant brushing aside the losses of Patrick Chung and Trey Flowers, arguably their two best defenders.

So yes, this looks exactly how you’d expect a team to look that doesn’t have Amendola, Edelman, Lewis, Chung, and Flowers, while Dont’a Hightower, Duron Harmon and Devin McCourty have begun to regress and none of the developmental players have developed. No one outside of Brady-Gronk-White and Wise for a down or two were able to make any impact.

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Pats Posits: And We’re Off…

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The Patriots got the 2018 season rolling yesterday with a 27-20 win over the Texans. For all the talk of last season and offseason drama, the Patriots very much looked like the same old Patriots that have laid waste to the league for the last 17 seasons.

Tom Brady finished with three touchdowns and one tipped-ball interception, looking nothing like an average 41-year old should look navigating an NFL pocket. The biggest difference was that he still had Rob Gronkowski, and the devastating QB-TE combo was just unstoppable.

This was nothing like last year’s maddening loss in the opener to the Chiefs. The Patriots have depth and new personnel issues, but they managed to rotate plenty of players in and showed that there isn’t any personnel problem that can’t be overcome with good coaching. Most exciting is a defense that has had an influx of improvement on a variety of fronts.

Yes, if you’re not a self-hating, self-punishing Patriots fan you should feel pretty good today. Clearly, the New England Football Machine is still firing on all cylinders and looks like they’ll once again be a formidable opponent for every team they face.

Let’s fire off a bunch of Posits and we finally get into the regular season flow!

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