I believe Allen also did this to Judon on one of his long runs. I'm waiting to hear that Judon was injured. must have been.
I'd call it a possibility, but injuries are not contagious and whatever happened during the bye seemed to infect the
entire defense at the same time. Nobody moreso than Judon, though. He went from unblockable to invisible. From
making plays to chasing them and it don't make sense.
I suspect that, over the course of the coming weeks, we'll hear something about a management decision that was
wildly unpopular among the players and served to kill their mojo. I have no evidence to back this up, other than the
somewhat weird Mac Jones' comments about "not practicing well" during the bye week, but I think
SOMETHING happened that upset the players a great deal, because they looked different in demeanor, style and
certainly the results from that point forward. I'll eliminate the Jags game because they simply weren't a competitive
opponent, imo. The rest of them marched on us seemingly at will.
Since I brought it up, I'll take a wild guess as to what MAY have happened.
Let's say that the players felt comfortable with the alleged duo of Jerod Mayo, whose role has never been publicly defined and
Steve Belichick, whose had been described as the defensive play-caller and de-facto coordinator. Earlier this season,
Matt Patricia had been re-hired but, again, his role was unknown. I believe the term "quality-control" was mentioned,
but whatever we did see him sitting alone in a booth during a game with a pencil and a notebook scribbling notes.
What if Patricia was privately installed, during the bye week, as the untitled Defensive Coordinator? Did our defense subsequently begin
to resemble a uber-conservative and ineffective Matt Patricia Defense with little pressure on the opponent's QBs? Did
we start to see more and more pre-snap uncertainty and hand-waving which had disappeared since MP left for
Detroit? Patricia has been described as wildly unpopular among his players from time-to-time and if that was the case
here then they may have felt like nothing was broke, so why fix it? and things started snowballing downhill from there. That could
explain the going-through-the-motions body language and complete lack of emotion that culminated in 7 straight TD drives
last night.
Put it this way-- how many times has Bill Belichick stated "we got outcoached" during the backstretch? Maybe that is because
he tried to jam a square peg into a round hole and it blew up in his face.
I'd be interested if anybody else had any similar thoughts. Something was rotten in Foxboro and I expect we will hear rumors
as to what that something was pretty soon.