If one were to peer behind all the positive statistics produced during Sunday’s 30-7 Patriots win over the Minnesota Vikings, they would see that the Patriots, so far are falling into a pattern of favoring that could catch them soon.
Patriot wide receiver, Julian Edelman has been without a shadow of a doubt, QB, Tom Brady’s, favorite target this season. He has been thrown to 15 times. In comparison, Brady has only thrown 44 completions this season meaning that Edelman has been the recipient of nearly 30% of his quarterback’s focus.
“We just have to find ways to get everybody the ball and spread it around to different guys,” Brady said to WEEI Wednesday morning.
With nearly half of his 398 passing yards coming via the mitts of Edelman, Brady is obviously struggling, for one reason or another, to build trust in his receivers.
Rob Gronkowski who, during preseason was drawn up as a piece intrinsic to each and every play he played this year, has been hit with just 8 receptions, the longest of which going for just 18 yards late in the game against Miami. Another example, Aaron Dobson was thrown two passes in his season debut Sunday. He caught just one of those passes, churning out a 13 yard gain well after the result of the game was under any sort of question.
Lastly, there is Danny Ammendola who, despite his struggles last season remains a player with multiple 100 catch seasons under his belt. Brady has thrown to Ammendola just 6 times this season. As for why the strange discomfort with Ammendola in particular, offensive coordinator Josh McDanials insisted that it was not due to any lack of skill on Ammendola’s part.
“I think Danny has shown that he can be an obvious contributor in our offense,” he said. “He did it last year -- played through some different things. And came up huge for us in a number of situations in a number of games. So I have a lot of confidence in Danny.”
The Patriots are struggling in fundamental football ways. Such struggles could be said to be very detrimental to any hope of a playoff run. The Patriots are well aware of this and know they need to vary their attack.
“To make us hard to defend is to be able to throw the ball to everybody.” Brady said “Those guys [Edelman and Gronkowski] have seen the majority of the throws, and I’ve got to do a better job of finding the other guys. There’s a lot of good routes, they’re big targets, guys are working really hard to get open, so hopefully it shows up this week in our pass game. We’re going to work hard on it this week to see if we can all be on the same page more often.”
Up and down the hierarchy of Patriots magnates, there is an understanding that it would be in the team’s best interest to involve more receivers than just Edelman.
“I have to do a better job to create a little more balance on our team offensively with our personnel, our play-calling, our plays and so forth.” Head coach Bill Belichick said, “Because we have a lot of good players. We have to be more effective,”
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