Despite Loss, Patriots Defense Proves It Can Deliver Against Top Competition

On the stat sheet and the football field, the New England Patriots’ defense appears to have had their rear-ends handed to them on Sunday against the Green Bay Packers.

In reality, their performance was good, and it should have been good enough for the Patriots to win.

New England came up on the wrong end of a 26-21 loss at Lambeau Field on Sunday evening, but while there are no moral victories in football, there are lessons that can be learned, and foundations that can be built toward the future, regardless of the result.

Yes, they will need to find out how to get more stops on third down. The Packers moved the chains at will, with conversions on 10 of their 17 third down attempts. That’s a large part of why the Packers held an advantage of 13:10 in the time of possession battle (36:35 for the Packers, 23:25 for the Patriots).

Yes, they will need to generate more pressure on the quarterback. They had three sacks of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, and a fourth that was wiped away on a penalty by cornerback Brandon Browner. But overall, their pressure on Rodgers was a lot like it has been all season: good at times, absent for stretches.

The Patriots only hurried Rodgers on nine of his 43 dropback attempts.

Despite all those struggles, they held the league’s second-highest scoring offense to only 26 points, after they spent the first 11 games of the season scoring an average of 32.2 points per game. They did it by holding the Packers without a touchdown on their four red zone possessions. Rodgers and the Packers had been scoring on an average of 65.1 percent of their possessions in the red zone before Sunday.

At one point in the third quarter, the Packers had run nine plays in the red zone for minus-four yards. Pitching a shutout against that group — in the most clutch situations — gave the Patriots hope in this game.

The secondary played about as well as one could expect. The Patriots did what they so frequently do, taking away an opponent’s best options and forcing them to beat them by other means.

For most of the game, Patriots cornerbacks Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner took away options A (Jordy Nelson) and B (Randall Cobb) for Aaron Rodgers, but New England was burned by option C (Davante Adams) for six receptions and 121 yards in the process. Revis and Browner turned in a mostly shutdown performance, yielding only four receptions on 10 targets between them, and logging two pass break-ups.

The high rate of third down conversions, and the long drives that resulted, were a large factor in the final outcome. So was the Patriots’ lack of pressure on Rodgers, whether it was by design to keep him in the pocket or simply an inability to get past the offensive line.

Those two factors were sometimes related, with Rodgers having more than 12 seconds in the pocket to convert one key third down. The pass-rush could improve with the return of defensive end Chandler Jones from a hip injury. His return should be around the corner, with the Patriots’ best edge defender finally making his return to practice last week.

That being said, Jones cannot be expected to lift the entire defense on his own. He will need help from the other defenders in the front seven, and anyone else on the field on third down and/or trying to get after the quarterback.

Of course, the Patriots learned about some areas they need to improve in the loss. But they also learned that they can compete with a contending team even when they play a less than perfect game.

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