When a team has a bye week at the midpoint of a season, it’s a good time to look at what’s happened and a good time to look at where one needs to improve before getting back on the field.
For the Patriots, most of the desire to improve comes on the offensive side of the ball. The team has slipped from sixth in points scored last year to 16th and their numbers are down in most other areas after eight games with Matt Patricia calling the plays for the unit.
Quarterback Mac Jones missed some of those games with an ankle injury and he’s experienced the same kind of individual downturns that the team has dealt with as a whole when he’s been healthy. At a Wednesday press conference, Jones was asked if he can see improvement despite the downturn in the numbers. Jones pointed to communication, footwork, and accuracy as places where he feels he has improved this year while saying statistics don’t tell the whole story.
“You can look at statistics, but a lot of times there’s some false realities there,” Jones said, via a transcript from the team. “But that’s also stuff that you can look at, ‘Hey, for team stuff, how many times are we doing this, running the ball, play action, screen?’ So, there’s a lot of things that coaches are looking at. Every team does that I’m sure, in some capacity. At the end of the day, like I said, if each individual player gets better, then we can kind of put that together as a team, and obviously as an offense and then kind of kick start the back half of the year here.”
Statistics may not reveal everything about how an offense is playing, but they’re generally in line with what anyone watching the Patriots play this season would say about how the unit has performed. They’ve still reached this point with a winning record, however, and the final eight games offer a chance to show that the best is yet to come for the offense.