Setting the stage for a pivotal Patriots week in Green Bay

GREEN BAY, Wisc. – I’ve dropped anchor out here.

Flew into Milwaukee, took the 110-minute ride alongside our cameraman Barry “Back” Alley, hung my hat at the Springhill Suites (shouting distance from the stadium), had a chicken Caesar wrap with bacon over at the Stadium View Bar, and apologized to the barkeep for having just water and a wrap.

The tundra is dry. Temperature mild. It’s like a nice September day.

I’m your eyes and ears for better or worse for the next five days of Patriots activity where I’ll chart the start of the Zeke Era.

The Pats and Packers launch practice on Wednesday and Thursday at 11:30 a.m. EST. We have Bill Belichick press conferences at 10:45 a.m.

IN MY EXPERIENCE … the two teams will work separately for the first portion of practices and then get together for some competitive 1-on-1s where, for instance, Patriots wideouts go against Packers corners and the Packers offensive line takes on the Patriots defensive line.

When team periods come, the most instructive and competitive work done will be competitive 11-on-11 with the starters squaring off. Hopefully we’ll see low red zone, high red zone and two-minute situations. Lotta important stuff happens in these workouts.

This was the part of camp two years ago when Mac Jones crept past Cam Newton to wrest away the starting job. Next week marks two years from the part of camp where Jones dominated the Giants while Newton was in COVID protocol, tucking away the competition and turning out the light.

Nothing as seismic (though inevitable) is likely to take place this week. But I want to know if Jones can look better than Jordan Love the same way he looked better than Daniel Jones two years ago. I want to see if the Patriots defense is as daunting for the Packers as it was for the always-rebuilding Texans.

And – again – more than anything else, I want it to look like they have their ish together. All the time. With 180 players running around on two fields and real competition in the air.

Why do I keep harping on this? Because as bad as the offensive coaching was, as semi-fraudulent as the defense was, if the Patriots simply weren’t stupid last year they would have made the playoffs.

I think people forget just how actively self-destructive they were. It wasn’t just the obvious like the kickoff return touchdowns, blocked kicks, penalties, throwing the ball backwards – TWICE – in the closing seconds of a tie game. It was a strong commitment to someone consistently NOT doing their job far too often.

After they lost to the Vikings last year in a pretty competitive game I did some math:

“Fifty-three accepted penalties in the past eight games after drawing six for 55 against Minny. Leading the league in holding flags (20), with 25 pre-snap penalties. Penalized 23 more times than their opponents. Flagged 77 times (11 declined penalties). Thirty negative plays offensively (not including kneeldowns), 26 sacks, five interceptions, four lost fumbles. That’s a total of 65 negative offensive plays. Add in the 53 penalties. That’s 118 negative plays in eight games. I figured it was overkill if I included the number of runs for no gain or one yard. There were a mess of those. Anyway, it’s preposterous! And yet, they are 5-3 in those games."

Then came the surrender against the Bills and the disaster against the Raiders and they were cooked for good.

So, yeah, I’m most interested in them looking like a Belichickian football team again.

And I was very encouraged when I asked Jabrill Peppers during an “Irrelevant Questions” segment (it’ll be on Quick Slants tonight at 6 and also on Tom Curran’s Patriots Talk Podcast), to fill in the blank on this sentence: “The 2023 Patriots will  …”

Peppers’ response after a moment’s thought? “Eliminate bad football. Be tenacious. Be fundamentally sound.”

I want to see how Zeke looks, whether Cole Strange comes back, what’s in store for Malik Cunningham this week and whether the defense continues to be suffocating.

But mostly, I just want to see if they can continue flushing the ineptitude and the unforced errors that were their trademark last season. If they do that, they’ll at least be giving themselves a chance.