With the New England Patriots’ season in the books after exiting the playoffs in the opening round, here are three positives and negatives from the year.
A year after winning the Super Bowl, the New England Patriots will spend the rest of the 2020 NFL Playoffs at home. The defending champions were eliminated from postseason play in the Wild Card Round, falling at home to the Tennessee Titans, 20-13, on Saturday.
With the loss, the Patriots saw their season come to an end early, suffering their first home playoff loss since the 2012 season while exiting the postseason the earliest they have since 2009.
Overall, New England had its season come to a close after compiling a regular-season record of 12-4 overall. After starting the season winning nine of their first 10 contests, the Patriots finished up the year struggling, losing three of their final five games and those struggling ways followed them into the playoffs.
Throughout the course of the regular season schedule, New England was able to claim its 11th straight AFC East title, finishing ahead of the Buffalo Bills, New York Jets and Miami Dolphins in the division standings.
The Patriots, which held one of the top two spots in the AFC for a majority of the year, ended up falling to the No. 3 seed in the final week of the year which resulted in them taking part in the opening round of the postseason against the Titans.
After an up-and-down regular season and a disappointing showing in the AFC Wild Card Game to kick off the playoffs, there are now many questions that New England will be faced with as it heads into the offseason the earliest it has in a while.
From addressing the big question surrounding quarterback Tom Brady and if he will return to the Patriots for a 21st season, to focusing on adding pieces to a few different areas on the team, New England now will begin a rare important offseason going into the 2020 campaign next year.
With the season now in the past and the offseason officially here for the Patriots, let’s look back at the 2019 season and come up with some takeaways and a few positives and negatives from the year that was for New England.
3. Positive: Defensive dominance
In year’s past, we’ve often seen the New England offense far outshine what it was able to do on the defensive side of the ball. But in 2019, both in the regular season and in the lone postseason contest, the defense was an area that the Patriots thrived in while the offense was an area where they struggled to some extent.
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The New England defensive group was stellar for really a majority of the season this year, leading the NFL or ranking near the top of the league in multiple defensive categories. They were able to stifle opposing offenses and beat them into submission, even when the offense wasn’t able to find their footing.
In 16 contests during the regular season, the Patriots ranked first in the NFL in total yards it allowed opposing offenses to average per game, giving up 275.9 yards per game. New England also ranked first in points given up per game with 14.1, while also managing to record a league-most 25 interceptions throughout the year.
For a team and an organization that has often been led by its ability to overpower opponents with its high-powered offense, New England’s defense was something that ended up leading the way in multiple games throughout the 2019 campaign and ultimately helped lead the Patriots to a 12-win season.
2. Negative: Offense taking a step back
Really ever since veteran quarterback and future Hall-of-Famer Tom Brady broke into the league 20 years ago, the Patriots offense has been one of the tops in the league behind their star quarterback under center.
Often times throughout the course of a year, we would see Brady maximize the amount of talent he had surrounding him on the offensive end of the field, even if the talent level of players lined up alongside him weren’t exactly top-notch.
In 2019, however, the lack of talent and firepower to pair alongside Brady was apparent and ultimately caught up to New England at the end of the season.
On offense throughout the regular season schedule, the Patriots managed to average a total of 354.0 yards per game, which ranked 15th in the NFL in 16 contests. New England also managed to rank seventh in the league in points per game with 26.2 points.
When comparing how the Patriots performed this year to that of others seasons, New England took a step back this year on offense. In the last five seasons, the Patriots averaged to rank around third in the NFL in points, while averaging a ranking of around fifth in the league in yards obtained.
It was apparent that the New England offensive unit took somewhat of a step back during the 2019 season, and it’s one of the areas that the Patriots are going to have to focus on improving ahead of the 2020 campaign.
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.