Do not look now, but Bill Belichick and the resurgent New England Patriots are the object in the rear-view mirror, tracking down some of the best teams in the AFC as the calendar pushes into the later-half of the season.
That was on full display at Gillette Stadium on Sunday, as the Patriots took on the visiting Cleveland Browns, a team considered by many to be among the favorites in the AFC heading into the season. If anything, it looked like New England should be considered among the best in the conference, as the Patriots handled the Browns with ease.
Yet again, Bill Belichick has a team starting to play its best football as the holiday season approaches. The long-time head coach has stressed over the years about the need for football teams to come into form as the playoffs approach, and this season might be his best example yet.
Back during the 2017, Belichick talked about how teams can build to that kind of late-season improvement:
So, we try to do it that way the first week, the 10th week and however many weeks there are after that. Always trying to do things as well as we can, give our players the best plan: instruct them, teach them and prepare them the best that we can. I know that they expect to play the best, put their best performance out there every week. You get fewer games, each one becomes more important and bigger and you want to do your best in them.
So I think everyone has the same goals there. I don’t think that’s a lot different than what it was in September. There are fewer games. We’ve had more practices. We have more opportunities. Hopefully our execution and play is better.
Belichick has also talked about how over the course of a season, you start to identify the players that can help you the most, and those are the players you start to rely on when the games matter the most:
We always make changes. It’s a process you go through. You put players in certain situations and certain groupings together and some work better than others, or maybe you see more potential in a certain player or group of players or combination of players than others, and you decide to move forward more with that or maybe you do it less because you don’t feel as good about it or players develop or improve or whatever it is and it’s just an ongoing process. It doesn’t happen overnight.
There’s no switch that you can flip. It comes through a lot of hard work, a lot of meetings, a lot of communication on how we’re going to do things and then a lot of on-the-field execution at actually doing them at a good competitive level so that we can gain confidence in each other as a unit as to how that’s going to happen in a live game situation. Working hard, continuing to improve and guys taking whatever opportunities they get and either moving forward with it or possibly somebody else getting an opportunity and moving ahead of a player at a point in the season. That’s just a competitive situation. We’re going to play the best players and basically everybody will get a chance to do it somewhere along the line, and the players that play the best will play more and the players that don’t do it as well need to improve and need to change their playing time status or they’ll continue to not get the playing time behind somebody else who is performing better.
Perhaps the best example of this in recent years comes from the 2018 season. New England struggled a bit early in the season, and even in December, and many wondered if that version of the Patriots would be good enough to make a deep run in the post-season. But into the playoffs they found their offensive identity, and indeed made a run, all the way to a Super Bowl title, Belichick’s sixth with the Patriots.
So what has the Patriots playing well right now? It starts with their defense, but also involves the improvement from their young quarterback.