3 Patriots Most to Blame For Sunday Night’s Loss to Dolphins

Things are feeling a lot worse this morning than they did last Monday. The Patriots’ Week 1 loss to the Eagles actually felt like a pretty positive game, having almost come back from the big early deficit. But it’s hard to find any room for optimism in starting the season 0-2.

There haven’t been a ton of standout players in New England so far in 2023, and football is such a team sport that you can’t fully place the blame for a loss on just a couple of players.

But some players certainly contribute more to these losses than others.

Here are the three Patriots most to blame for last night’s 24-27 loss to the Miami Dolphins on Sunday Night Football.

Patriots to Blame for Week 2 Loss to Dolphins

1. Calvin Anderson

Calvin Anderson really struggled in pass protection in Week 1, but we were willing to cut him some slack. He had missed the preseason and was making his Patriots debut against an incredibly good pass-rush unit on the Philadelphia Eagles defense.

He gets no such excuses in Week 2, where his pass protection once again made things incredibly difficult on Mac Jones and the rest of the offense.

Just check out a few of the lowlights:

https://twitter.com/BenBrownPL/status/1703598935703474196

This is bad.

Anderson was fine as a run blocker, but that doesn’t offer nearly enough value to make up for his overall struggles.

This line is incredibly beat up, but even a healthy Anderson is not offering any value at this point.

Hopefully Riley Reiff will be healthy enough to return from IR when he’s first eligible in Week 5.

2. DeVante Parker

If you didn’t watch the game, DeVante Parker’s stat-line might seem like he had a fine night. And heck, if you have him in fantasy football the 10-plus points you got from a 6-reception, 57-yard night aren’t going to be at blame for your loss.

But make no mistake about it, Parker had a really rough showing.

One of the simplest ways to encapsulate this is his entire rep on the interception Mac Jones threw to Xavien Howard.

This is obviously a designed timing route gone wrong — it looks on the surface like it’s just Mac Jones making a bad choice by throwing to a covered receiver, but this is situation where it’s Parker’s job to be there at the right time.

Parker is 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds. He’s our big-bodied X receiver on the outside. He’s supposed to be capable of using his physical tools to be there at the right time.

And on this rep? It’s hard to tell if it’s a lazy rep or he just such a poor job that it looks lazy, but either way it’s awful.

He lets Howard force him all the way to the sideline on his release without putting up any kind of a fight. So already he’s made this play about as difficult as it can be.

And from there Parker gets totally manhandled. Even though he sees the ball coming before Howard does, he’s not able to make anything resembling progress toward getting free and working back to it for the reception.

Whether this was Parker being soft or Parker being lazy, either one is unacceptable — especially when you’re not making any big plays and contributions to make up for it.

3. Jahlani Tavai

Let me start by saying the Miami Dolphins are probably the last team I’d want to face as an off-ball linebacker. Sure, you’re not being tasked with crashing into a massive running back like Derrick Henry every play, but you’re almost sure to get exposed.

Few teams in the NFL are going to make you cover as much ground, both vertically and horizontally.

And when you’re trying to cover ground against an offense with this much speed, you’ve often gotta guess where they’re going ahead of time — if you wait to know for sure, you’ll never catch up.

Tavai guessed wrong a lot, and even still found himself out of position and beat with speed when he didn’t,

But his struggles went deeper than that.

His tackling was poor. That’s something you don’t see often in a Bill Belichick defense, and not something you can afford against the Dolphins. It’s hard to get your hands on their players, but once you do you need to finish the play.

He also did a poor job setting the edge against the run, which just opens the floodgates for disaster. Keeping contain is priority number one against a run game with this much speed. It’s the cornerstone that can make or break the entire play for the defense, and in Tavai’s case it was far too often “break” last night.

It wasn’t all bad (he had a really nice TFL on the goal line in the first quarter), but he’s not enough of a playmaker to make up for being fundamentally unsound. His struggles not only put himself in bad positions, but made things a lot harder for the rest of the defense around him.

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