Patriots’ next men up help get the job done against Bills
Patriots running back James White (28) celebrates a touchdown with teammate Danny Amendola (80).)
COMMENTARY
FOXBOROUGH – You may have heard that the NFL is a copycat league. To be more precise, you may have heard countless uninspired copycat pundits tell us with all the seriousness an overmatched studio analyst can muster that indeed it is a copycat league.
Now, I have no idea whether this is actually true in terms of strategy and approach, though watching Eric Mangini and Josh McDaniels dress like their wardrobes came exclusively from the J.C. Penney Belichick winter collection during previous head coaching stints was amusing enough.
Of course, wanting to copy another franchise’s approach and actually pulling it off are daydreams of different measures. A significant reason that the Patriots, who improved to 10-0 with a 20-13 sludge-fest of a victory over the Bills on Monday night, have now won at least 10 games for 13 consecutive seasons while virtually every other franchise in the league has had comparatively fleeting peaks and multiple trips into valleys in the same span is that they don’t really feature an easily-mimicked system.
Instead, Bill Belichick and his staff attempt and achieve something much more novel: They appropriately deploy their talent to maximize their players’ abilities, emphasizing their strengths and rarely asking them to be any more than what they are.
Even knowing that these Patriots utilize their personnel as effectively as any football team we have ever seen, it’s still probably foolish of us to expect one player to step in and replicate the performance of another player who held a similar role before him. Yet we do it anyway. With this team, the outcome sometimes suggests we weren’t entirely wrong in expecting it.
The Patriots have endured their share of injuries in recent weeks, losing vital receiver Julian Edelman and dynamic running back Dion Lewis — a pair of players who, by the way, combined for 247 total yards and three touchdowns on 25 touches in the Week 2 win at Buffalo. The offense suffered without them in the home-turf rematch Monday night — and yet the players who were presumed to be obligated to pick up the slack for Edelman and Lewis proved to be more than competent semi-replicas.
Danny Amendola, an important part of the offense on most days this season but one whose relevance grew in Edelman’s absence, collected nine catches for 117 yards. He would have had more had an open-field play not been blown dead with nothing but open space between him and the end zone by a hapless officiating crew that conducted itself all night as if it were on the Buffalo Wild Wings payroll.
He was especially Edelman-like on a touchdown drive in the final minute of the second quarter that gave the Patriots a 10-3 lead into the break, picking up 18 yards to the Bills’ 44 with a catch-and-stop move that left Buffalo cornerback Stephon Gilmore lunging at a ghost. The Bills, who had aggravated Brady time and again through the first 29 minutes, suddenly and inexplicably began playing like Rex Ryan had decided to let his brother coordinate the final defensive series of the half. Brandon LaFell pulled off a diving 24-yard catch, and then the player who was charged with filling Lewis’s role showed what he can do.
James White, a fourth-round pick a year ago out of Wisconsin, actually was supposed to be the player, at least by our semi-informed presumption, who replaced Shane Vereen as the third-down, change-of-pace back this season. But Lewis seized the role, and with White’s duties seeming limited even after the dynamo ahead of him on the depth chart was lost for the season, this game felt like something of a referendum on whether he was capable of contributing in any meaningful way this season.
Let’s just say the James White referendum passed. He punctuated that critical late first-half drive with a 20-yard touchdown reception, shaking off a would-be Bills tackler inside the 10 and taking it into the end zone for his first NFL touchdown. While it wasn’t as electrifying as a juke-laden Lewis run (sometimes watching him, you wondered whether he was plunked in front of the TV as a kid to watch Barry Sanders highlights while other kids were watching Dora the Explorer), it was impressive enough, and necessary evidence that he is capable of providing all-important yards after the catch. He would add a second touchdown with a 6-yard run in the third quarter. You can bet Rex Ryan knows his name now too.
The concern, if there is one after a hard-fought win against a division opponent, is that the next-man-up approach could reach a point of diminishing returns. Amendola left with a knee injury, Aaron Dobson departed as well, and by the end of the game LaFell and rookie Chris Harper were the only healthy receivers.
“We had to work around [the injuries], yeah,’’ acknowledged Belichick. “I mean, we’ll see what it is going forward but tonight we definitely had to work around it. I thought Josh [McDaniels] did a good job managing the game, and we were able to do what we could do. It wasn’t necessarily what we wanted it to be, but it was good enough.’’
Even with the depth of the Patriots’ roster, there will come a point when the next man up isn’t capable of ably filling in for the last man down, when the next guy who ascends to the top of the depth chart due to attrition isn’t good enough. We’ve seen that movie before — we’re one more costly injury from watching Matthew Slater run fly patterns in a meaningful game.
“Yeah, we’ve lost a lot of guys, and we’ve lost quite a few guys over the last three weeks,’’ said Brady. “So I think we’ll just keep fighting and figuring out a way to win, and it’s good to win against a good defense. Any way you can get these wins, I think it’s a positive. I think just whoever is in there, we’ve got to have confidence in what they’re doing.’’
It helps when those players justify such confidence. Amendola and White aren’t Edelman and Lewis; what they are is a pair of players who performed to the best of their abilities Monday night in part because they weren’t asked to do anything more than what they are capable of providing. They were prepared, and they came through. That is the Patriots’ way, the truest expression of the Patriots’ system. While the coach and the quarterback are reasons 1 and 1A for the Patriots’ extraordinary success, the plug-and-play capabilities of so many players through the years remains a significant reason why even the most determined copycat can’t replicate what they do.
Even during a game as ugly and frustrating as Monday’s, watching the latest next man up rise to the occasion was a hell of thing, even if we’d be cool with not having to witness it anymore going forward.
Chad Finn can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.
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