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Fear not, the Patriots will shuffle off to Buffalo for a win

By Tom King - Staff Writer | Jan 10, 2022

Wipe away those sour looks, New England Patriot fans. We’ve got good news for you.

The Pats will win their Wild Card Playoff game.

Yes, they will down the Buffalo Bills this Saturday night despite what you saw on Sunday afternoon in Miami in a 33-24 loss.

Why? Because when the chips are down, this team tends to recover, and the Bills, as good as they looked at Gillette Stadium a few weeks ago, simply don’t play well in cold, wind, etc. Sure, New England limps into the playoffs having lost three out of its last four, and certainly weren’t feeling too good after Sunday’s loss to the Dolphins. You could tell from the postgame reaction that while health was the primary importance, they were in it to win it.

So, evidently were the Las Vegas Raiders late Sunday night/early Monday morning when they kicked a field goal to knock the Chargers out of the playoffs and put the Pittsburgh Steelers in. Charger coach Brandon Staley’s foolish timeout prevented a tie that would have sent both teams to the playoffs and the Patriots on to Cincinnati, as they say.

Oh well. It would have been fun to see New England battling Joe Burrow. But if you were able to catch any of the Bills-Jets, you saw a Buffalo team that simply couldn’t move the ball with the wind in its face. The Jets forced five straight three and outs.

Now what? The Patriots still need to right the ship in a hurry. But this group is pretty resilient.

“As a group, we really have to jump in,” Patriots veteran safety Devin McCourty said. “You want to put everything into it, because if you don’t, that’s it. We have another performance like this, that’s it. So as a group, individually you want to put your all into it because there’s no tomorrow.”

McCourty said that “culture doesn’t matter”, the same culture we feel will carry the Patriots into the AFC Divisional Round after this weekend. He’s right, because each week is its own, each season is its own. “It’s really irrelevant to the current team,” he said. “Those teams in the past had different players.”

But the same philosophy, the same coaching, still carries over. The Patriots were beaten by Josh Allen at his best. Can he do it again? Doubt it.

But the Patriots still need to get better starts. In all three of their recent losses, they have had to play from behind.

“We’re not doing anything well enough early in the games to give ourselves a chance to get into a rhythm and make it competitive early on,” Patriots special teams captain Matthew Slater said.

Forget the notion that the Patriots have battled their way back into the games they’ve lost. That foolish question of whether they take solace in the fact they “fought” was asked yesterday over and over. Really?

“We’re still not going to quit, but this time of year, going out there and competing til the end doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have more points than the other team,” Slater said.

Exactly. The Patriots aren’t looking for style points. Bill Belichick isn’t boob (hopefully soon to be former) Giants coach Joe Judge talking about how his team fights, blah, blah.

Usually the Patriots like to be playing at their best when they begin the playoffs. But they’ve been through ups and downs before.

“We don’t have three or four weeks of good football to rely on,” McCourty said. “It hasn’t been our best. But if we sit there and say we have no shot because it hasn’t been our best because it hasn’t been our best than we might as well not show up next week.”

The thinking here is we’ll see their best on Saturday. Or at least something way better than yesterday.

So the Patriots will move on from 80 tropical degrees of Sunday to next Saturday’s temps forecasted in the low teens. Allen won’t play nearly as well as he did at Gillette, and the Patriots won’t play nearly as badly as they did for much of the regular season finale in Miami.

That combo will have them moving on to the next round.

Tom King can be reached at tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or on twitter @Telegraph _TomK.

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