In a 16-game season, there will be bad days, and Sunday was a bad day for the New England Patriots in Jacksonville. Defensively, they had a hard time slowing down Blake Bortles(29-45, 377 YDS, 4 TDs) and the Jaguars offense. The Jaguars scored 31 points and had almost 500 yards of offense(482), which helped them defeat the Patriots 31-20 in a rematch of last year’s AFC title game.
Offensively, the Patriots had a hard time moving the ball against the vaunted Jaguars defense, who kept Tom Brady(24-35, 234 yards, 2 TDs) and the New England offense in check.
The Patriots did not have one of their better days, and according to Brady, who had a costly fumble early in the fourth quarter, it’s hard to beat a good team like the Jaguars when you have a bad day.
“I mean, it’s a long year. I think you have a bad day against a good team—it’s a recipe for losing,” Brady said.
“And we shouldn’t even have had a bad day, and we’ve got to learn from having bad days—and these things don’t just magically happen, you’ve got to make them happen, and we’ve got to, all of us, have to have more urgency to do things right—more often—over the course of practices, games and then, it’s just a matter of going out and executing and playing. It was us. I mean, the first couple of drives, it was just us. I mean, you’re behind and then, playing in a situation where playing against a great team on the road that plays well went over our heads, and they played really well.”
It’s a long season, and the Patriots, just like every team in the NFL, are still working through things. Furthermore, the Pats are still trying to work through things on the offensive side of the ball without WR Julian Edelman, who will return in Week 5 after being suspended by the league for four games after testing positive for PEDs.
In the end, Jacksonville is going to be a tough team, and if the Patriots want to go back to the Super Bowl, they will probably have to see this Jaguars team again somewhere down the line, if they do, New England better hope they play better than they did on Sunday.