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Sure, last week was big, but this Sunday Night is the Patriots’ biggest game of the season
The Patriots get a chance to lock up a playoff berth against a proud Ravens team clinging to its postseason hopes.
Welcome to Season 14, Episode 16 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious yet lighthearted, nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup …
Maybe this is a prediction, or maybe it’s just common sense. But it seems apparent that we’re going to learn more about the Patriots in Sunday night’s prime-time matchup with the Ravens than when they dropkicked a 17-point halftime lead and lost to the division rival Bills last Sunday.
This game is bigger than the last, and any of the 10 straight the Patriots won preceding it for that matter, because we’re about to find out which problems revealed by Josh Allen and friends have immediate solutions and which ones don’t.
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The Patriots get a chance to lock up a playoff berth against a proud Ravens team clinging to its postseason hopes. After colliding with Allen, they get a chance to face another MVP, two-time winner Lamar Jackson, though he missed one practice with an illness this week and has been dealing with an assortment of injuries.
What else? They get a chance to show that quarterback Drake Maye can bounce back from his first mediocre performance since the season’s first month, that the attrition on the defense can be overcome, that there are solutions to stopping the run, and that their second-half offensive struggles are a habit ready to be put in the past.
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It’s important to remember where the Patriots are: 11-3 is a remarkable record by any measure, especially considering the expectations entering the season. But we’re still learning about just how good they are. The Bills exposed some problem areas. The Ravens will try to do the same. How they fare will tell us a lot about the reality of this team’s aspirations.
Kick it off, Borregales, and let’s get this thing started …
Three players worth watching other than the quarterbacks
Derrick Henry: It’s starting to feel like a long time ago that the Patriots defense was stout against the run. In the three games since defensive tackle Milton (Worth Every Dollar) Williams went down with an ankle injury in the Week 11 victory over the Jets, the Patriots have allowed an average of 134 rushing yards per game after keeping seven of their first nine opponents under 74 yards per game.
Furthermore, the Patriots didn’t allow a single runner to surpass 50 yards until Tampa Bay’s Sean Tucker ran for 53 in Week 8. The Bengals’ Chase Brown became the first opponent to clear 100 rushing yards, with 107 on 19 carries in Week 12. This past Sunday, the Bills’ James Cook slithered through the Patriots defense for 107 yards and a pair of touchdowns on 22 carries. His longest run was 12 yards, but Cook was able to gain 5- and 6-yard chunks whenever the Bills wished.
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And now the Patriots must deal with Henry, who thundered for 100 yards on just 11 attempts in the Ravens’ shutout of the Bengals. Henry, who is first among active running backs in rushing attempts (2,588, 13th all-time) is still thriving at age 31, with 1,125 yards, 11 touchdowns, and a 4.8 yards per attempt average this season.
The Patriots’ early dominance against the run was a bit of a mirage due to game circumstances. Now, despite still ranking fifth in the NFL with 95.1 rushing yards allowed per game, it is trending toward being a major problem.
Robert Spillane, the Patriots’ leading tackler, was in a walking boot early in the week after missing the Bills game, and fellow linebackers Christian Elliss and Harold Landry are also banged up. The Patriots signed former Jaguars third-round pick Chad Muma off the Colts practice squad, but it remains a regret that the linebacker corps wasn’t boosted at the trade deadline.
Up front, Williams isn’t eligible to come off injured reserve until next week, leaving Christian Barmore (four pressures against the Bills) to face steady double teams, which is also affecting their mostly ineffective pass rush.
Perhaps Mike Vrabel’s experience coaching Henry for six seasons with the Titans will provide the Patriots defense with some insight on how to best deal with him. But that can only do so much given the Patriots’ personnel deficiencies right now.
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TreVeyon Henderson: Through the Patriots’ first seven games, the rookie second-round pick totaled just 43 carries for 153 yards and a touchdown. No one with even a shred of patience thought he was a bust, but even those of us who preached early on that his breakout was coming were beginning to wonder whether he actually needed a year to get acclimated to the NFL, much like James White, Shane Vereen, and a few other Patriots backs before him.
And then, the breakout came. He ran for 75 yards on 10 attempts against the Browns, and he has been a dynamic part of the Patriots offense since. Over the last seven games beginning with that Week 8 rout of the Browns, Henderson has carried the ball exactly 100 times for 620 yards and 6 touchdowns.
Henderson found his stride, and it happens to be a stride that makes him as big a threat to take it the distance as any Patriots back I can recall seeing. He has three two-touchdown games in those last seven games, with four of those scoring runs going for over 50 yards. Only the Colts’ Lenny Moore in 1956 and the Giants’ Saquan Barkley in 2018 have also had four 50-yards-plus TD runs in their rookie season.
With 773 rushing yards this season, Henderson has an excellent shot at 1,000 yards. He was downright electrifying against the Bills, with 148 yards and a pair of long touchdowns, but it is fair to suggest that there are still a few too many 1- and 2-yard runs on his ledger.
The Ravens’ 15th-ranked run defense (111.1 yards per game) has been sturdy lately, allowing just 34 rushing yards to the Steelers two weeks ago and 100 to the Bengals last week. But Henderson and Rhamondre Stevenson, who ran with toughness and purpose against the Bills, are no easy challenge.
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Kyle Van Noy: A dependable defensive piece for the Patriots’ 2016 and ‘18 Super Bowl winners, the 34-year-old linebacker can still muster a big play once in a while. He made one of the plays of the week in the NFL last Sunday, intercepting Joe Burrow in the fourth quarter and lateraling to Alohi Gilman for a 84-yard return for a touchdown.
The lateral was probably a wise decision: NextGen Stats tracked Van Noy as running 16.2 miles per hour before the lateral, which is slightly better than Philip Rivers’s footspeed at this point. Maye’s eyes will get awfully wide if he sees Van Noy matched up with Henderson in coverage.
The flashback
Considering they’ve met just 16 times, the Patriots and Ravens have a rather storied rivalry.
It helps the legend that four of those matchups came in the postseason, including AFC Championship games in 2011 (won by the Patriots) and ’12 (won by the eventual champion Ravens). The Patriots are 9-3 against the Ravens in the regular season, but split the four playoff showdowns.
One of the playoff victories over Baltimore stands in my opinion as the most impressive and memorable victory of the second phase of the Patriots dynasty, excluding Super Bowls.
Of course, I’m talking about the Patriots’ 35-31 victory in a 2014 AFC Divisional Playoff at Gillette Stadium. The Patriots trailed by 14 points twice — 14-0 in the first quarter, and 28-14 in the third — and had to come back against a Ravens defense that could really get after the quarterback (Elvis Dumerville and Terrell Suggs combined for 29½ sacks that season).
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The Patriots cut the Ravens lead to 28-21 with just under 7 minutes left in the third on a Tom Brady to Rob Gronkowski 5-yard TD pass. Then offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels cooked up some much-needed trickery, a double pass in which former Kent State quarterback Julian Edelman threw a strike to Danny Amendola for a 51-yard touchdown pass to tie the game.
The Ravens briefly seized the lead again on Justin Tucker‘s 25-yard field goal with 10:17 remaining, but Brady hit Brandon LaFell with a beauty of a throw for a 23-yard touchdown for the final points with just over 5 minutes left.
That might have been a divisional playoff game, but it had the tension of a Super Bowl.
Grievance of the week
It’s been a struggle many weeks to find something to gripe about in this space during this delightful surprise of a Patriots season.
So just imagine how much of a struggle it must be for those in sports radio and television that traffic in grievance. They’ve had to be — gasp! — positive. Their hearts have been forced to grow 3½ sizes. I feel for them this holiday season.
I suspect the shortage of things to complain about regarding these Patriots is a big reason why Vrabel’s candid comments on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” Monday about the offense getting “cute” against the Bills got so much traction this week.
The usual suspects have been trying to stir up rumors of discord between Vrabel and McDaniels all season, despite Maye rapidly developing into a MVP candidate thanks to the guidance of both of them.
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Vrabel is blunt in a Bill Parcells kind of way, and he did seem frustrated that McDaniels’s pair of trick plays and perhaps some new twists to the offense didn’t have much of a payoff for the time apparently spent on them.
But he wasn’t wrong, and he’s not going to say anything on a sports radio show or during a press conference that he won’t say directly to players’ and coaches’ faces.
Too many people around here have Belichick Syndrome, where they’ve been conditioned to believe candor and emotion is a bad thing. And too many others just want to complain about something, often because they have nothing else to say otherwise.
Prediction, or I still can’t believe Bill Belichick never brought Ed Reed to the Patriots
The Ravens have scored 24 or fewer points in their last five games. The Patriots have scored 24 or more points in each of their last nine. Trust the trends and the math.
Patriots 31, Ravens 23
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