Sly as A Foxboro

The New England Patriots seemed to be ripe for the picking prior to this game but the resilient and wiley Belichick gang hold on for a quality win over the visiting boys from Baltimore.

The newly reconfigured Patriots defense is what cuaght me off guard. They held a potent Ravens rushing attack to a 116 yards. Although I do think that Baltimore was suckered into abandoning the rush needlessly. Let's face it, Joe Flacco maturing fast in this league but his success has been predicated off of running the ball. His passing game works much better in a balanced attack. He threw the ball 47 times to their 17 carries. ???????????? Hello?

It is not like they were getting ran out of Foxboro and had to cut a huge lead. The game was tight and the Ravens should have pounded the ball some more and kept the Brady bunch off the field. You give Brady the time of possession edge and he will make a mediocre offensive effort stand up for his team and he did just that. Plus if you throw the ball 47 times you better average more than 5.6 yards per attempt. That is not good enough on this league. Especially when you are running at 6.8 yards per attempt.

Now people will say "yeah you're just looking at the stats". Does it matter? Look I did not think they had to throw that much, end of story. Look at the Patriots for proof in the pudding.

They ran the ball 30 times for only 85 yards but it helped set up some play action, as running the ball always does, and eat some time. It's offense 101 folks. And the Patriots do not have a lethal backfield and they did against a team that eats the rush for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack!

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I am dumbfounded at teams that do not see the forest for the trees. Play action is not some cliche. You can't make yourself one dimensional. Hey if you find yourself down 21 to nothing well, that may mean you need to throw more. But you can't just air mail the ball 47 times and get nothing for your return. My view is if you had dialed back the attempts by 10 at least you would have set yourself up for getting more out of your passes. The 10 more rushing attempts would have given the defense more cause to expect you to run more.

It's like a pitcher in baseball who throws a fastball 7 out of every 10 pitches. Any MBL hitter will succeed if he knows he has a 70% chance of seeing a fastball every pitch. 47 pass attempts to 17 runs will rarely ever work.

Now if you can get some turnovers, maybe you can make the inbalance work. However when you turn the ball over on top of that? And when you drop balls? AHHHHHHH!

That is the worst part of this game. Despite an odd style of play calling the Ravens still could have closed the deal on this game. ASK Mark Clayton what happened there. I will take this opportunity to say, credit Clayton for being man enough to except blame for his egrigious sins of dropped balls.

Hey a loss in Foxboro is not anything to be ashamed of but hopefully this is another learning experience for the Ravens and their 2nd year Head Coach. Back to the drawing board!

By: Andy Natalie
ProFootball-fans.com Baltimore Ravens Correspondent