New England Patriots: Positives and negatives from 2019 season

1. Positive and negative: Start and finish to the year

When it comes to this aspect of evaluating the year that was for New England, you could view it as both a positive and a negative to the Patriots’ year. To kick off the regular season schedule, New England got back to form early on in the schedule and emerged as one of the hottest teams in the NFL through the first half of the year.

In the first 10 matchups of the season, the Patriots managed to win nine of those 10 games to jump up to the top spot in the AFC standings while looking like they would be a frontrunner and favorite to once again make a deep run in the postseason once the calendar flipped to 2020.

But in the last handful of weeks to round out the regular season schedule, New England surprisingly took a turn for the worst while it managed to struggle to wrap up the year ahead of the start of postseason play.

In the final five weeks of the regular season, the Patriots fell in three of those five games including losing two of those three contests at home in Foxborough. That rough patch featured a shocking Week 17 loss to Miami, which resulted in New England dropping to the No. 3 seed and going on to lose their first-round bye and playing in the Wild Card Round of the playoffs.

New England hoped those end-of-season struggles wouldn’t carry over into the postseason while hosting Tennessee in the AFC Wild Card Round, but those struggles did ultimately follow the Patriots into their first-round playoff loss.

Although New England had the positive of starting the year off strong and getting off to a quick start to the 2019 campaign, the Patriots ended the season with the negative of going through a tough stretch in the final few games of the year while ended the season with an early exit in the playoffs.