It’s time for the Patriots to play hard and lose with dignity, starting with a trip to the Cardinals
Coming off their much-needed bye, New England will face the playoff-contending Cardinals in Arizona.
Welcome to Season 13, Episode 14 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious yet lighthearted, nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup …
And now we’ve reached the Lose With Dignity portion of the schedule … hopefully.
That is the best outcome for the Patriots, who come off their much-needed bye to face the sub-.500 but still playoff-contending Cardinals in Arizona, right?
This is what must happen Sunday, and over the final four games. They must play with relentlessness and discipline (for once), coach with boldness (Jerod Mayo is overdue to do that), find the balance between protecting Drake Maye and giving him opportunities to let it fly, gather more intel on which players are keepers and which must be discarded, come close to winning all four games, don’t actually win, and let your fans daydream about having a shot at Colorado’s Travis Hunter or another cornerstone at the top of the 2025 NFL Draft.
Pretty simple blueprint, right?
Kick it off, Slye, and let’s get this thing started …
Three players worth watching other than the QBs
Marvin Harrison Jr.: We know you’re out there. You don’t admit it now — you have forsaken your take — since Maye has shown pretty much everything anyone would want from a rookie quarterback chosen No. 3 overall. But there are people among us — perhaps you, dear reader — who wanted the Patriots to select Harrison with that pick.
I wonder how that would have looked. Harrison, the son of former Colt and Hall of Famer Marvin Harrison Jr., has had a fine if inconsistent rookie season with the Cardinals, who took him at No. 4, the first non-QB off the board.
Harrison has had huge games (4 catches, 130 yards, 2 TDs in a 41-10 rout of the Rams in Week 2) and ineffective ones (he’s had five games with 36 or fewer receiving yards, including nada in a 34-13 loss to the Packers in Week 6). Overall, his numbers (45 catches, 655 yards, 7 TDs) are fine, especially for a rookie.
But had the Patriots taken him? I won’t say there would be outright remorse, because his talent is obvious, and competent receivers remain high on the wish list around here. But he probably would be, oh, 75 percent as productive as he has been, given that we have no idea who would have been throwing him the ball. Would it have been Bailey Zappe? Jacoby Brissett? Zo, down from the broadcast booth?
Go ahead and consider this as one more way of saying general manager Eliot Wolf, for whatever questionable personnel decisions he made in the offseason, got the most important thing right.
Harrison’s seven receiving touchdowns lead all Cardinals pass-catchers, and if DeMarcus Covington has the sense to match up cornerback Christian Gonzalez on him, that matchup will make for one of the game’s most intriguing subplots. But it should be noted that Harrison is not the most dangerous weapon in the Cardinals’ aerial attack. That designation belongs to tight end Trey McBride, who has 80 catches for 851 yards, but has yet to score a touchdown this season. Over the last three games, McBride has 31 receptions on a staggering 41 targets for 299 yards. Given that usage, it would almost be a surprise if he doesn’t get his first touchdown this week.
Ja’Lynn Polk: It’s easy to forget now, amid the struggling rookie receiver’s medley of dropped passes and false start penalties, that his NFL career did begin with some promise. He had an impressive training camp, and in Week 2 caught the first touchdown by a Patriots receiver this season — a 5-yarder from Jacoby Brissett that put the Patriots up 7-0 in their eventual 23-20 overtime loss to the Seahawks.
Not much — OK, nothing — has gone right since for the second-rounder. He has just 12 catches on 31 targets for 87 yards and a pair of TDs for the season, and suffered a concussion against the Jaguars in Week 7. The second touchdown came in the Patriots’ stirring Week 10 win over the Bears, when he ran a nifty route to get wide open for the 2-yard score. But he hasn’t built on that, with just 1 catch on 3 targets for 7 yards over the last three weeks.
Fellow rookie receiver Ladd McConkey’s success with the Chargers hasn’t helped his perception, either. The Patriots traded down from No. 34 to 37 in the second round, allowing Los Angeles to select McConkey, while Polk was the pick here. (The Patriots also got a fourth-round pick, used on receiver Javon Baker, who remains without a reception. A fifth-rounder sent to the Chargers turned into cornerback Tarheeb Still, who has three interceptions, including a pick-six. The deal does not look great right now.)
The expectation here is not that Polk will have a breakout game Sunday, though the Cardinals’ pass defense is mediocre (18th, 218.7 yards per game). This is more about seeing progress. Polk — who said earlier this week that he experienced a similarly slow start in college and then “it was greatness” for his final two years at Washington — is atop the list of Patriots who must show improvement over these final four games.
James Conner: One detail we should learn more about this week: whether the Patriots can patch up their run defense for good before this season concludes.
The Patriots currently own the league’s 20th-ranked run defense at 124.7 yards per game, but a lousy early-to-midseason stretch make it feel worse than that mediocre ranking. In Weeks 5-7 — losses to the Dolphins, Texans, Jaguars — the Patriots allowed an average of 185.3 yards per game. For context, the Panthers have far and away the worst run defense in the league, at 170.1 yards per game. During that stretch, the Patriots were somehow worse than that.
It has been better lately, which coincides in part with the return of defensive tackle Christian Barmore, who debuted in Week 11. The Patriots allowed just 81.6 rushing yards per game from Weeks 10-12, before Jonathan Taylor, Anthony Richardson, and the Colts dropped 144 yards on the ground on the Patriots before the bye.
The Cardinals are similar to the Colts in that they have a quarterback who is downright dangerous on the run. Murray has run for 444 yards and 4 touchdowns while averaging 7.7 yards per attempt.
But the Cardinals lead back, the former Steeler Conner, is more of a brute-force runner than the Colts’ shifty Taylor. Connor has run 201 times for 863 yards and 5 touchdowns, leading an Arizona run game that ranks sixth in the league at 139.8 yards per game. The Cardinals are also sixth in total rushing yards (1,818), and third in yards per carry (5.2), so they will make the Patriots prove and prove again that they can stop the run.
The flashback
Considering that the Cardinals’ franchise is 219 games below .500 in all of its incarnations and home cities over a 105-year existence, it’s wild that the Patriots actually lost seven of their first eight meetings across their mutual histories.
The Patriots’ first win against the Cardinals came on Sept. 10, 1978, in Week 2. The Patriots prevailed 16-6, steamrolling the host Cardinals (then in St. Louis) with 269 rushing yards on 52 attempts. Don Calhoun led the way with 143 yards on just 17 carries, while four other Patriots, including quarterback Steve Grogan, had at least 19 rushing yards.
The Patriots, behind left tackle Leon Gray and the best guard ever to play the game, John Hannah, would run for an NFL-record 3,165 yards that season. That record stood for 41 years, until Lamar Jackson, Mark Ingram, and the 2019 Ravens totaled 3,296 yards on the ground.
Grievance of the week
Maybe it will go badly for Bill Belichick, head coach, University of North Carolina.
Maybe it will begin well and soon buckle, like it did for another coaching legend who decamped for the college ranks. Bill Walsh went 10-3 at Stanford in 1992, and 7-14-1 over the next two seasons before retiring. Genius in this sport does have a shelf life.
Or maybe, just maybe, there are some answers in that 400-page How To Build a Program manifesto — and heck, answers that come from his valuable experience as a six-time Super Bowl winning head coach — that will make North Carolina a contender and a destination.
We don’t know. All of those outcomes seem possible to some degree. But I’ve been taken aback over the last few days since the coach now known as “Chapel Bill” accepted the job at how many people are certain he’s going to fail.
Some of it, I think, is wish-casted schadenfreude, a hope that the coach who destroyed other NFL franchises’ hopes and dreams over two decades while often coming across as a grunting, snorting, monosyllabic misanthrope is finally going to get his comeuppance.
Some of it also seems to be a protectiveness by certain voices in college football media, as if it would be an affront for an NFL lifer to come in and find immediate success while mastering all of these new complications and headaches such as Name, Image, Likeness and the transfer portal.
I think any certainty about how this is going to go is nuts. And much of the instant dismissal of “Chapel Bill” — without considering how much he has surely thought this through — is petty and short-sighted.
I don’t know how it’s going to go. Neither do you, and neither do they. But I do know this: As a college football agnostic for the most part, I’m looking forward to having a team to watch next fall. Belichick, their heel turned Tar Heel, is good for college football, whether those that care about the sport the most care to recognize it or not.
Prediction, or I’ll hear your argument that the Patriots should still be trying to acquire Larry Fitzgerald …
The Cardinals have lost three games by a seven points or less, including a 23-22 loss to the potent Vikings two weeks ago. The Patriots lost by a point to the Colts in their last game before the bye. Another one-point thriller? Nah … the Patriots will struggle to contain Murray and Connor on the run, and this one will not have such suspense. Cardinals 27, Patriots 19.
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