FOXBOROUGH — The New England Patriots assembled 10 straight wins, putting them at the top of the AFC. However, they suffered a devastating loss to the Buffalo Bills in Week 15, ending their winning streak.
But could this have been a good thing for the team? Were they getting too comfortable and complacent?
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“I would say that’s TBD,” head coach Mike Vrabel told reporters when asked about this on Wednesday. “I don’t know. It’s only depending on how you respond, how you prepare, how you practice, and ultimately how you play. So, we’ll see. There’s a lot of good things in there, and we’ll need all those things on Sunday night against this football team that’s 6-2 after their bye, and really coming off a big win last week. A dominant win.”
Hearing this from a coach is one thing, but it is the players who will take the field on Sunday and try to get back on track against the Baltimore Ravens. So with that, Patriots Wire spoke exclusively with numerous players to get their opinion on whether a late-season loss can be viewed as a good thing.
“I was actually talking about this with Hunter Henry,” center Garrett Bradbury explained. “We were both like, I don’t like saying it’s a good thing because you never want to lose. Like, you can learn lessons through winning, too. So, obviously, we would rather have won, but call it a wake-up call, call it a, I don’t know, it’s just you might pay attention to the details a little bit more.”
He added that Vrabel’s message for the team at the start of the week was “let’s play for each other. Let’s play for our identity this week.”
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Wide receiver Mack Hollins had similar sentiments.
“I think any loss can be a positive. It doesn’t matter if it’s Week 1 or Week 17 as long as you still have a shot to continue playing,” he said. “As long as there’s a next game, you can learn from anything. As long as the war isn’t over, you can still fight. So to me, this loss doesn’t make any difference in terms of timing. Obviously, you want to win all of them, but in terms of timing, at least for me, it doesn’t matter.”
As did cornerback Christian Gonzalez
“It could be at the end of the day,” Gonzalez explained. “I mean, the loss is nothing but a lesson. You learn from winning, and you learn from losing. Obviously, it feels better to learn after a win, but sometimes a loss can be necessary in terms of things, so it’s not a bad thing. We’re able to learn from it and see what we needed to fix and move on and be ready for this one.”
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As for linebacker Jack Gibbens, he talked about looking at a loss as a way to have more urgency and fix some things that might have been issues in past weeks, but truly stood out in the loss.
“Obviously, we want to win every game that we play, so it’s hard to say a loss is a good thing,” Gibbens said. “But definitely after a loss, I feel like you can have a little bit more of a sense of urgency to get some things fixed. Some stuff that if you’re continually winning, you can kind of like, ‘Oh, we’re winning, we’re winning,’ and you can maybe lose sight of some small things that can be big things later. So, I think it is good in the sense of it’s eye-opening to say, ‘Hey, we got to get this fixed.’ And the sense of urgency kind of picks up a little bit.”
Right tackle Morgan Moses completely agreed.
“I’d rather lose in the regular season than lose in the playoffs, right? So I think it’s good for us,” he told Patriots Wire. “We’ve been riding high for some time now, and I think it just allows us to look back in the mirror at ourselves and see what we need to correct. Obviously, it’s easy to skip over the film when you’re winning and not detail things you need to as a player. But when you have a loss under your belt, you look at the little things of, how can I get this block better? And I think it just allows us to look in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, these are the things that we probably might have been getting away with a little bit, and let’s hone back in on those things, the details, techniques, and fundamentals, and get this thing going again.”
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As for cornerback Marcus Jones and safety Jaylinn Hawkins, they are just ready to put the loss behind them and, in their words, “bounce back.”
“I would say, like I’ve said before, we’ve lost before, and we were able to bounce back. So it’s one of the situations we just need to learn from this game and then go from there,” Jones said. “Us as a team, we know that we just can’t go out there. People aren’t just going to lie over. It’s the National Football League, any given Sunday. But I would say, we don’t have guys on the team that’s complacent. Anytime we come in, no matter if we win by a lot or lose, we’re still trying to dial into the things that we need to dial into, and then take it one day at a time.”
“Just look at it as a way for us to bounce back,” Hawkins detailed. “Get back on our identity, what we want to do, and handle that. That’s just how I look at it. You always can find positive and negative out of things, but the biggest thing is bouncing back. So, I see it as that.
And in the words of Bradbury, he doesn’t think the players need “any added motivation.”
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“I think the way Vrabel set it up is like come to work every day, every Sunday, ready to put who we are as a team on tape,” Bradbury added. “And when you’re more worried about that than you are your opponent, I think that you’re going to play good football every Sunday, no matter the circumstances, no matter what you’re playing for, no matter after a loss. So my hope is that we just go out there and do what we’ve done all year and just play hard and play how Coach Vrabel wants us to.”
While the mindsets somewhat differ among players, it’s clear that they are all ready to get back into the win column.
“Just quickly flush it out and get on to the next week,” linebacker K’Lavon Chaisson stated. “Obviously, it’s not what we wanted, and we’re not going to push the agenda that it’s okay to lose, or it’s needed. We’re still pissed for sure. But we’re more so pissed that we beat ourselves. So obviously, we know going into this week, we’ve got to clear up a lot of things on our way in order to put ourselves in a position to win games. And that’s just a heavy focus for sure, going on to this week.”
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This article originally appeared on Patriots Wire: Patriots weigh whether costly Bills loss could help spark late push
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