The Patriots have lost two consecutive games, and in those games they have converted just 6-for-22 on third downs. Patriots receiver Kendrick Bourne says something needs to change.
Asked after Thursday night’s loss to the Bills if the Patriots need to do something drastically different on third down, Bourne said they do.
“Um, yeah, man, we need to scheme up better,” Bourne said, via the Boston Herald. “We need to know what they’re doing. We need to know what they wanna do on third down, you know what I mean? It’s kind of sporadic. They call this, and we call that, and it falls right into what they want. You know what I mean? We need to have it where they’re falling into what we want, things like that. So that’s not my job, my job is to just run the call, but as we all can see, they had what — 30 first downs and we had eight? So something they were doing against us is working and something we’re doing against them wasn’t working, so it’s just about figuring it out each week. We’ve still got life, but we need to hurry and pick it up.”
Bourne is right about that: The Patriots are rapidly slipping out of playoff contention, and they need to get things fixed in a hurry. They certainly do need to scheme up better.