Two games this week, and unfortunately my work travels didn’t give me the time to make picks. I would have been 1-1 (picking the Pats and Jets to win).
Dolphins@Patriots
This game was basically over when the Dolphins decided to let the Patriots have the ball first.
The Dolphins, coming off of two consecutive wins, under HC Dan Campbell, learned the hard way that the Titans and Texans are bad football teams. These Patriots are for real.
The Miami defense had no answer for Gronk, as he toyed with them at will. Suh went back into lethargy, and Wake is lost for the season. Grimes looks undersized against all good taller WRs, the rest of the defense is no different from before the new soup mixture was prepared. For this team to continue the rebirth towards respectability, this defense has to grow by leaps and bounds (stole this line from CJ).
Offensively the Dolphins were just as inept, as they seem to regress back to that amazing Lazor mentality of losing football. The lowest passing attempts games are the ones this team has won, hello Lazor! Tannehill is not yet ready to carry a team on his own, and this game was proof once again. Get back to running, and keeping Tannehill under 30 attempts per game. Next up? A trip to Buffalo and an opportunity too finally not get blown out in a divisional game.
The Patriots are on a roll, and yes the credit has to go to Tom Brady, but let’s look at Bill Belichick for a moment. Tom is Bill’s Knight, and he uses him according to the other team’s moves. In some games Tom is used as the main man (see Jets game), totally forgetting that teams in football actually have RBs that can take a hand off, and run with it. In others, BB remembers that the RBs can actually run, and he deploys them in a more traditional way (see Dolphins game). Belichick will go down as the best HC ever in the NFL, and I am now convinced that even without Tom, he would win a ton of games.
Next up for the Patriots, a visit from the mighty Redskins.
Jets@Raiders
The Jets went west, but their defense stayed east. This was a game that this team was going to play sooner or later, and they looked bad doing it. Nothing worked, nothing.
The main culprit? The defense and the stupid game plan that was so naive, they got pushed around by Carr and company. The defense couldn’t defend, they couldn’t tackle, they hardly could cover. They refused to stop Murray, mind as well just have told the Ref before the game: “ can we just give them a win without playing, please.” Outside of David Harris and Mo Wilkerson, nobody saved themselves, in the poorest effort we seen since last season. Wouldn’t want to have been on that flight back, Todd Bowles couldn’t be happy with anyone, including himself. If this team has intention of making a run at something better than 8-8, the defense must defend.
The offense started out well, Ryan Fitzpatrick hurt is thumb (I didn’t do it!), and was replaced by Geno. That drive ended with the only lead of the day, a FG. It was very obvious that Geno’s timing with the receivers, was off. His favorite targets were the guys he actually did get to practice with, Kerley and Thompkins. The running game was non existent for the second straight week. Ivory was stopped for losses multiple times. Eventually Geno got it and started the come back, however, hard to come back when your strength, the Defense wasn’t defending.
Geno also got hurt twice, Matt Flynn may be coming back to town…up next? The Jaguars.
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