There’s Plenty to Patriots’ Gains

Averaging a league-leading 38 points, the New England Patriots are discovering that it isn’t enough to simply rate as the team to beat in the NFL, which has been their status since they displaced the Rams in the Super Bowl at the beginning of the year.

It takes more than sound coaching and great players for any football club to keep winning. It also takes some luck and a strong emotional investment. Above all, football is a game of emotion.

The Patriots could well be reminded of this today as the NFL matches two of its seven unbeaten teams at San Diego.

Even though they have the Chargers clearly outmanned, this is a game that could be won by the players who put their hearts as well as their backs into it.

Last week, when the Kansas City Chiefs went to Foxboro, the Patriots didn’t take a nine-point underdog seriously.

They finally won, 41-38, only because they’d won the overtime coin toss after a 42-point fourth quarter in which everybody scored at will.

Each side made three touchdowns in that last quarter, and, beyond much doubt, it would have been not Patriot quarterback Tom Brady but Kansas City running back Priest Holmes taking charge in the game’s only overtime possession if the coin had landed right for the Chiefs.

For emotion is most of defense and the New England defense never did get into the game.

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Dolphins Next

Seven days hence, in the league’s Week 5 headliner at Miami, the Patriots can be expected to get serious about the Dolphins.

That one is already being talked about as the first really big game of the NFL season, so both sides will show up.

As yet, it isn’t easy to know how good the Dolphins are. Their 3-0 start--against winless Detroit, shaky Indianapolis, and a New York Jet team that still seems shellshocked after a 44-7 beating by New England--has provided some clues but nothing definitive.

What every Patriot fan is doubtless wondering about is not San Diego quarterback Drew Brees this week but Miami running back Ricky Williams next week.

The question: If Kansas City’s Holmes could run for 180 yards against New England, how far will Williams get? A former problem child in New Orleans, Williams has started a new life with three 100-yard games and could make it four against the Chiefs today. And what then? Five in Week 5?

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The Emotion Card

Of the many things about New England Coach Bill Belichick--in his first season as a front-runner--the most helpful, possibly, is that he understands not only pass offense now but how to play the emotion card.

He knew, for instance, that the Patriots would have to take Kansas City in stride. During a 17-week season, no champion can think of every opponent as a must victim in a big game.

There are, in competitive sports, always periods of up and down, and in their Kansas City game the Patriots were emotionally down.

Belichick, though, has always been a knowledgeable motivator who, to enjoy another successful season, realized earlier this month that he had to get the Patriots up for their Monday night opener against the favored Steelers.

And he did.

Then, immediately, he had to get them up for another spotlighted start in New York against the favored Jets. And again he did.

In the Kansas City game, though, with fast-moving Miami looming, Belichick had to give his emotionally spent players the day off, and, again, he did.

That was apparent as early as the Patriots’ first offensive series against Kansas City, a series ruined by a dropped pass and a penalty. Whenever football players aren’t quite ready mentally or emotionally, they drop passes, draw penalties for avoidable errors, and make other mistakes that good players usually avoid.

And by the end of the quarter, the Patriots had dropped four passes, had earned five more penalties, and had made other kinds of mistakes they never made while, say, beating the Rams in the Super Bowl.

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Still Throwing

Bill Walsh, the former San Francisco coach who in the 1980s brought passing back to the NFL after the running-play doldrums of the 1960s and ‘70s, has often said that one of the advantages of pass-play football is that passing teams are more resistant than running teams to up-and-down cycles. It takes less emotional energy to throw and catch than to smash through the line.

And that’s one reason the Patriots survived the Kansas City game.

By repeatedly throwing Brady had four touchdown passes while totaling 410 yards passing to lead the league for the week.

Before he got started, however, the lethargic Patriots fell behind, 10-0, in the second quarter. Even when they did things right, they did something wrong. As rookie Deion Branch returned a punt 53 yards to give the Patriots some first-quarter momentum, they gave it back with an unnecessary late hit.

During the games of the NFL’s first 50 or 60 years, good teams getting an emotionally slow start often finished apathetically. But this is the league’s 83rd season, and we’re in a passing era for teams that know what passing means--such as Belichick’s this season.