Patriots’ dynasty won’t end at hands of Mike Vrabel and the Titans
It does not end Saturday, at home, against this team, like this.
Welcome to Season 8, Episode 17 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious-yet-lighthearted, nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup.
The Patriots can be excused if they’re not interested in getting reacquainted with any other old friends any time soon.
Last week, respected former Patriots assistant Brian Flores, in his first season as the Dolphins’ head coach, came to Foxborough with his admirable pesky squad and ruined the Patriots’ best-laid plans, pulling off a 27-24 upset that kept his former employer from earning a first-round bye and ensured that Tom Brady, Julian Edelman, and friends would have to work this weekend. Not a very charitable act by Flores this holiday season.
And who do they end up playing Saturday night because of last week’s blown opportunity? Just another group of old contemporaries, and one unlikely to bow at the altar of Bill Belichick and Brady, especially now when the reigning Super Bowl champions appear to be as vulnerable to early-postseason defeat as they have been in a decade.
The Titans, who have gone 7-3 — including wins over the Chiefs and Texans, both of whom defeated the Patriots — since Ryan Tannehill was installed as the starting quarterback in Week 7, are coached by former Patriots linebacker (and occasional red-zone weapon) Mike Vrabel.
Much noise was made this week about Belichick’s odd struggles against former assistants — he’s 12-12 after the loss to Flores’s Dolphins. Vrabel doesn’t quite fit that criteria, having begun his coaching career at Ohio State. But he is both familiar and unintimidated by the Patriots’ way of doing things (“Isn’t that the street the movie theater is on?’’ he responded with appropriate sarcasm this week when asked about the Patriot Way), and he’s 1 for 1 in regular-season matchups against Belichick, his Titans having delivered a 34-10 throttling last year.
He may not be interested in exploring Patriots catchphrases, but he sure doesn’t mind having ex-Patriots around him. A number of people with ties to the franchise are with him in Nashville. The Titans’ general manager is Jon Robinson, a former Patriots college scouting director. Logan Ryan (who has had a superb season) and Dion Lewis are among the ex-Pats on the Tennessee roster. (Malcolm Butler is on injured reserve.)
Perhaps most notably, the defensive coordinator is Dean Pees, who once held the same role with the Patriots, didn’t depart on the best terms, and has had some success game-planning against Brady in the years since. He’s 3-3 against the Patriots as a defensive coordinator. Maybe this is ominous, maybe it isn’t, but he held the same role for the Ravens 10 years ago when Baltimore routed the Patriots, 33-14, in the wild-card round — the last time the Patriots have played in that round until Saturday.
As for the Patriots, well, you know what they need to do. A week after playing their best game of the season against the best defense they’d faced in months in a 24-17 win over the Bills, the Patriots melted into a puddle against the Dolphins, playing their worst football against a team they’d beaten, 43-0, in Week 2. For them, it’s not so much about worrying what old friends will do Saturday. It’s about getting reacquainted with their old selves and playing their best football when the stakes are highest.
Kick it off, Bailey, and let’s get this thing started . . .
THREE PLAYERS I’LL BE WATCHING NOT NAMED TOM BRADY
Ryan Tannehill — Wait . . . when did this guy get good? How did that happen? And are we sure it’s for real? During his seven seasons with the Dolphins, Tannehill was the definition of a mediocre quarterback, the human embodiment of a 7-9 record, the Jeff Fisher of QBs. If there’s such a thing as the median QB in the NFL, it had to be Tannehill, good enough to start, but not good enough to keep anyone who followed the Dolphins from daydreaming about a better option. As it turns out, he was someone else’s better option. Signed as a free agent in the offseason by the Titans, Tannehill relieved habitually inconsistent Marcus Mariota during a loss to the Ravens in Week 6, started the next week, and has been nothing short of Drew Brees-like since. With Tannehill playing by far the best football of his career, the Titans went 7-3 since the quarterback change. In that span, they have averaged 30.4 points per game while leading the NFL in yards per rush (5.6) and yards per pass. Tannehill led the league in yards per attempt (9.6), yards per completion (13.6), and quarterback rating (117.5, higher than Brady’s career best of 117.2 in 2007). He completed 70.3 percent of his passes, with 22 touchdowns and just 6 interceptions, apparently turning the Titans’ offense into Air Tannehill right before our eyes. That’s a decent sample size of excellence, but there are reasons to wonder whether he can keep it up against the Patriots’ No. 1-ranked defense on Saturday. He’s 0-6 as a starter at Gillette Stadium, this is his first playoff start, and he was sacked 31 times this season. This would be a fine day for Jamie Collins to find his early-season form as a pass-rush monster.
Derrick Henry — The Titans’ midseason reinvention into a balanced, potent offense isn’t entirely because of Tannehill, of course. It may not even be primarily because of him. Former Heisman Trophy winner Derrick Henry emerged in his fourth NFL season as the league’s most prolific back, leading the NFL in rushing (1,540 yards) while scoring 16 touchdowns (tied with Green Bay’s Aaron Jones for tops in the league) and picking up 5.1 yards per carry. Henry is massive — he’s listed at 6 feet 3 inches, 238 pounds, and looks larger — but isn’t just a powerful inside presence. He is superb at beating linebackers to the edge and turning the corner, which means Patriots edge defenders such as Collins and John Simon will have to be supremely disciplined on Saturday. Henry dealt with a hamstring injury late in the season that led to him sitting out the Week 16 matchup with the Saints, but he returned in full force in the regular-season finale against the Texans, picking up 211 yards and three touchdowns on 32 carries. The Patriots have had moments of vulnerability against the run in the second half — Cincinnati’s Joe Mixon ran for 136 yards in Week 15 — but still finished with the league’s sixth-ranked run defense (95.5 yards per game). If Dont’a Hightower, Kyle Van Noy, Lawrence Guy, and Danny Shelton can slow Henry, that makes the task much tougher on Tannehill.
Rex Burkhead — Sony Michel will probably get more touches early Saturday night, and one of the heroes of last season’s Super Bowl run has earned the chance with 259 yards on 58 attempts over the past three games, a 4.5-yard average. But Burkhead has been a quiet force in a limited role over the past few weeks. Over the same three-game span, he’s run 17 times for 121 yards, a 7.1-yard average. He has twice as many touchdowns as Michel in that span (2-1), and perhaps most impressively, he was quickly forgiven by Belichick for fumbling in the first quarter of the Bills game. He’s trusted in postseason circumstances, and against Tennessee’s run defense he should be able to demonstrate why.
GRIEVANCE OF THE WEEK
Not so much a grievance this week as a plea, gang: Enjoy it. This is the 11th straight season with a playoff game at Gillette Stadium. Brady is going for his 31st playoff win, which would be 15 more than second-place Joe Montana. It’s all so remarkable. One particularly dumb Fox Sports show has been running a countdown clock to the end of the dynasty all week. I don’t think it ends Saturday. But enjoy it while you have it, while you’re still in it, while the greatest dynasty in the history of professional football is still in the present tense.
KEY MATCHUP
Patriots cornerbacks vs. Titans WR A.J. Brown
I wouldn’t hold it against Patriots fans for having receiver envy when it comes to some of their opponents this season, including the Titans. Heck, Brady probably has a little envy himself. Julian Edelman was the Patriots’ top receiver with 100 catches. Second among wide receivers? Sporadic deep threat Phillip Dorsett . . . with 29. That’s not exactly Kurt Warner/Greatest Show of Turf-level production there. First-round pick N’Keal Harry had 12 catches in seven games, which is fewer than Jakobi Meyers (26), Mohamed Sanu (26), and ex-Pat Josh Gordon (20), among others. Harry is far from a bust — he’s basically this team’s version of 2018 Cordarrelle Patterson right now, with promise of greater things ahead — but it’s hard not to look at A.J. Brown’s production with the Titans and wish they could get similar production from a young receiver one of these years. Brown, taken with the 51st overall selection in April (19 picks after Harry), finished his rookie season with 52 catches for 1,051 yards — a Stanley Morgan-like 20.2 yards per catch — and 8 touchdowns. Four of his touchdown catches went for at least 50 yards. Stephon Gilmore — looking to bounce back from a performance against Miami that may have cost him Defensive Player of the Year — defended Corey Davis in last season’s matchup with the Titans, allowing 125 receiving yards. Speedy Jonathan Jones might make a more obvious matchup on Brown, but he’s recently returned from a groin injury, and ex-Titan Jason McCourty is still dealing with a groin injury. J.C. Jackson should also get a turn, but participating in shutting down Brown would be a fine way for Gilmore to put the memory of last week behind him.
PREDICTION, OR I BET EDDIE GEORGE COULD STILL PICK UP 3 YARDS ON THIRD AND 2
Full disclosure: In the aftermath of the Dolphins loss, when we found out the Titans would be the Patriots’ opponent, I was ready to declare a lot of things over. The end of the season. The end of an era. Perhaps the end of Brady’s career. But over the course of the week, that notion of the end of a dynasty started to soften and fade. First, there was Van Noy coming up with the “revenge tour’’ theme, noting that the Titans had beaten them last year and the Ravens, Texans, and Chiefs had defeated them among potential future playoff opponents. That seemed a fun and focused way to look at the task at hand. Then, Belichick was upbeat (yes, for him) during his various weekly media responsibilities, saying time and again that he believed in this team’s ability to put a lousy game behind it. Then the weather reports started trickling in midweek, suggesting there could be a decent amount of snow Saturday night. And I started thinking about satisfying lousy-weather games at Gillette against the Titans through the years: The 17-14 victory in limb-freezing temperatures in the 2003 divisional round (Bethel Johnson had his moments, people!), and the Patriots’ 59-0 clobbering of a Titans team in the snow in October 2009, when Tennessee played like it never wanted to leave its team plane and couldn’t wait to get back aboard. I know, it’s easy right now to draw other comparisons to something else from the 2009 season — namely, that embarrassing playoff loss to the Ravens, which occurred the last time the Patriots were on the docket Wild Card Weekend. But this Patriots team isn’t that one, and Belichick has been saying as much between the lines all week. This team is flawed — no, we have no clue what to expect from Brady and his receivers on Saturday night — and this degree of difficulty in prolonging the season is entirely self-inflicted. But I believe in this defense. I believe it will make Henry get stuck in neutral like it did with Jerome Bettis back in the day, and I believe it will end this charade of Tannehill playing like he’s Dan Fouts. I know it’s going to end for this Patriots dynasty, perhaps soon. It does not end Saturday, at home, against this team, like this. Patriots 24, Titans 20
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