FOXBOROUGH — After several games this season, the Patriots’ defense has had a specific takeaway of what it needed to do better. It happened after wins and losses.
Each time, the Patriots focused on that area in the following week’s practices, and so far adjustments have been made. String those weeks together and those improvements have contributed to a familiar trend for this franchise: The defense is getting better as the season progresses.
“I think [it’s] just continual work,” said safety Devin McCourty. “The NFL season starts with the first three or four games and all the predictions come out. You’re either great on offense, bad on defense, great on defense, bad on offense, you’re either going to have a Super Bowl chance or you won’t, and I think after that people kind of think everything is set in stone. I think here everyone thinks of the season as a continual, gradual process of getting better.”
As was noted in September when the Patriots broke out of the gate at 1-2, slow starts are not unprecedented in these parts. The Tom Brady-era Patriots entered this season with a .709 winning percentage in September and a .768 winning percentage the rest of the way.
Including 2018 would only strengthen the point. The Patriots finished 2-2 in September and haven’t lost since, taking an AFC East-leading 7-2 record into Sunday’s game against the Titans (4-4) in Nashville. There were many culprits in the Patriots’ September losses in Jacksonville and Detroit, the defense among them.
By points allowed, the Patriots actually haven’t improved. They surrendered 21 points per game in Weeks 1-4, and 23.6 per game since. Usually, the opposite has occurred.
Over the past five years, the Patriots gave up 21.2 points per game in the season’s first four games, and 18.3 in games 5-16. That’s not an enormous drop, but it’s significant enough that in 2018 the 2.9-point difference would represent a team going from eighth in the NFL in points allowed to third.
“This is a team that continues to improve over the course of the season, and that’s one thing that I’ve always appreciated, when I was a player there or now coaching against them, is that there’s progress that’s made throughout the season,” said Titans coach Mike Vrabel, a former Patriots linebacker. “The team that you see at the beginning of the season is not the one that’s there at the end.”
The difference was stark last season, when opponents were averaging 32 points a game against the Patriots in the first four games, then just 14 points per game the rest of the way.
In a season in which scoring is up in the NFL, there are signs the Patriots’ defense is trending in the right direction. The Patriots have allowed fewer than 400 yards in back-to-back games for the first time this season (and Tennessee is 30th in the NFL, averaging just 288.2 yards per game). The point total is also skewed by the relatively satisfying 43-40 victory over the high-scoring Chiefs in Week 6. Mostly, the Patriots feel like their defense is improving because they have been hitting specific week-to-week benchmarks.
First it was third-down defense. The Lions and Jaguars combined to convert 60.7 percent of their third downs in beating the Patriots. In New England’s six-game winning streak, opponents have converted just 39.8 percent of their third-down plays. The Bears converted 50 percent in their 38-31 loss in Week 7.
After the Chiefs burned the Patriots’ defense for a pair of 60-plus-yard plays, Bill Belichick and his staff focused on eliminating the big plays leading up to the Bears game. For the most part, they succeeded, but a new issue cropped up when quarterback Mitchell Trubisky scrambled six times for 81 yards and a touchdown.
Back to the classroom for Buffalo, although Bills quarterbacks Derek Anderson and Nathan Peterman didn’t provide much of a test. But against the Packers last Sunday night, quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who entered the game averaging 6.4 yards per rush, ran for just 8 yards on four attempts.
McCourty said the Patriots stay in good condition, which helps them later in the season. He also attributed the improvements to the team’s practice habits.
“Days like last week, a short week, we were still in pads on Thursday getting ready,” McCourty said. “So I think that enables us to get better throughout the year because now we’re approaching our 10th game and that’s a lot of football that’s been played since training camp, preseason, all those regular-season games. You would hope you’d start to improve.”