FOXBORO -- The Patriots have preached the merits of "complementary football" since Bill Belichick has been their head coach. But it's been lacking for some time now.
Their defense has been, for the most part, good enough to compete. The offense has not. And on Tuesday, Belichick's two top assistants on the defensive side -- Jerod Mayo and Steve Belichick -- were asked if the non-complementary nature of the team at the moment made life difficult for those operating on the more functional side of the ball.
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“I would be lying if I said the players don’t feel some of that,” Mayo said. “At the same time, us as coaches, it’s our job to remind them, we’re not on that side of the ball. Let’s continue to get them the ball and see what happens. And that’s pretty much the way we approach it.”
The contrast in performance levels for the Patriots offense and defense has been sizable. Through five games, the Patriots rank 32nd in expected points added per play offensively; they're last in the league in both EPA per dropback and EPA per rush. Defensively, they are 13th in EPA per play allowed; they're 16th in dropback EPA allowed and 15th in rush EPA allowed. (Their special teams are an issue as well, according to DVOA, as they rank 32nd in the league in that category.)
Do coaches have to guard against finger-pointing, Steve Belichick was asked? He acknowledged that kind of blame-laying is a possibility. "I'm not a big point fingers type of guy," he said. "But yeah, it does happen. That's very realistic."
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Still, Belichick explained that his focus remains on improving what they're doing on his side of the ball without worrying about the other side.
"I was kind of brought up by my dad and my grandpa," he said. "Like, 'Get your [expletive] together yourself.' Like, don't be worried about the rest of the people in the room. If you just worry about yourself and do what you need to do and lead people in the way of doing what you need to do better and stuff like that... There's always corrections that you can improve on if you're hard on yourself and you have a standard to yourself.
"That's kind of what I try to do is, 'Do you think this was good enough? Or if you do, could it have been better than good? Because it's definitely possible. Try to control what you can control.' "
Saving their season isn't going to be without a variety of potential schism-inducing stressors. Unfortunately for the Patriots, the only way to fully guard against potential infighting is to put out a better product offensively. And given the way they've played the last two weeks, that will be no easy task.