JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Devin McCourty boiled down the defensive performance by the Patriots on Sunday simply enough.
"Couldn't do anything," he said. "That's what we'll see. We'll watch the film. It'll come to that. I don't think it'll be like guys weren't playing hard. It was just we didn't play well enough. Every time we were close, they were a little better. I think that's how it felt out there."
One week after a strong defensive performance against one of the top up-and-coming quarterbacks in the league, the Patriots couldn't do much right -- at least early on -- against one of the most inconsistent passers in football.
Where to start? Blake Bortles completed 29 of 45 passes for 377 yards, four touchdowns and a pick. The Patriots weren't exclusively in man coverage, but they played a good deal of man, as they often do, and the Jaguars cooked up multiple man-beaters to create openings in the secondary.
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Patrick Chung got caught up in a pick play near the line of scrimmage in the second quarter on one such route. That put the Patriots down, 21-3.
New England Patriots
"[We knew] as a unit, overall, if we came and played this team that way . . . it was just going to be hard," McCourty said of falling behind 14-0 and letting things snowball.
"I think that's what you saw. We had chances where we had a good drive, a good stand, got it a little bit going, but they're a good football team. We knew we wasn't just going to be able to spot them 14 points and just come back. I thought we had good effort but we just didn't play well today."
And when the Jaguars did find openings in the secondary, the Patriots had trouble bringing them down. Dede Westbrook's 61-yard catch-and-run touchdown was a back-breaker, but the Patriots allowed a whopping 212 yards after the catch total Sunday. Running back Corey Grant, who was separating from linebackers for much of the afternoon, ended up with 66 yards of catch on his own.
Given the lack of pressure Bortles saw, he had time to sit back, let the man-beaters develop, let his receivers find wide clearings to do damage with the ball in their hands. The Patriots racked up just three quarterback hits and didn't sack Bortles one week after beating up on Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson.
Trey Flowers left the game injured in the first quarter, robbing the Patriots of their top rusher, but his teammates up front were able to do very little in the passing game. Adrian Clayborn got into the backfield for a pair of hits, but Deatrich Wise and Keionta Davis (who started opposite Rivers) accounted for just five total pressures.
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"Definitely, it shortens up the rotation a lot," Davis said of Flowers' injury. "But we practice for it. We condition for it. That's part of the game. Injuries are going to happen . . . You gotta be ready to step it up and play it out, even in conditions like this. It was tough, but still just gotta play better."
And then there was what Bortles was able to do with his legs. When Patriots linemen lost their rush-lane discipline up front, he made them pay with 36 yards on five scrambles. Three of Bortles' four third-down scrambled went for back-breaking first downs.
"I felt like he did what we felt like we knew he could do on the field," McCourty said. "Even in the AFC Championship Game. "We knew he could scramble and move around. Today he did it in big moments, too. It wasn't a surprise for us. We knew he was capable of that."
The Patriots tightened things up for stretches in the second half. They turned the ball over. They got stops. But they dug themselves such a deep hole early, they couldn't scale their way out.
"Gotta get better," McCourty said. "We talk about it all the time. Early part of September, October, wins, losses -- you just gotta keep getting better. Obviously it's a lot easier to go out there and work and get better after you go out here and lose like this. Guys just gotta stick together and we'll get back to work."