How the NE Patriots win in my view

The actual ‘Patriot Way’, call it the Patriot Method, is that players are instilled with a cost-reward approach to each play. This has a few very simple but powerful effects. First, it means they accept the other team can compete on plays. They don’t take risk on regular plays or, rather, they compete on regular plays within a set of rules they internalize that balance the risks. It’s not that they want to bend but not break, but that their choices lead them to bend because they allow the other team to compete on plays. If the other team can do it, the Patriots figure they’ll win some and lose some of those battles. Second, when the game becomes more intense, the Patriots keep competing but they adjust the risk-reward balance to fit the higher stakes. This means the advantage becomes theirs because the other team tends to become either too cautious or too reckless or, perhaps a better way to say this is the other team starts to think a bit too much, either waiting too long or reacting too quickly. The Patriots are built to make decisions in pressure circumstances because they’re built to make those decisions on every play. They understand how the context affects the risk-reward learning they’ve internalized, so they react better to tighter windows and can seize momentary advantages, and they can do this as individuals and as a team. Third, this means the Patriots are built to have close games with teams that play well and, bluntly, if the opponent realizes they can compete up and down the field, they probably induce good opponents to play well. That’s part of the Patriot Method too: you are a better team if you can handle opponents that play well, that are able to compete with you, because that’s how you learn how to win under pressure. As a note, they didn’t play very well for much of the Jaguars game. That’s a different topic: why do teams play well or badly? I can say why the Patriots are resilient, why they believe they can improve during a game. Jerry Kramer in Instant Replay – that’s a book by a lineman about the block on the play that won the famous ‘Ice Bowl’ – says the Packers under Lombardi believed they never lost a game; they just ran out of time before they took the lead. Added: I thought of a better way to explain this, I think. When you watch a football game, you may see a number of really fine plays. And then you wonder why NE doesn’t make these plays, why it seems the other teams pull off big plays and the Patriots don’t – except in big situations, because then they clearly do. The answer is that cost-reward approach: they play to win and winning takes place over time, over a quarter, a half, and over the whole 60 minutes, and then from game to game within a season. Individual plays are moments. The Patriot Method trades some of those moments for consistency, for not giving up big plays. This shows up by the end of the year, both in the win total and in the way the team of that year and for that year has put its knowledge together. This is one reason why the beginnings of seasons for the Patriots are often rocky: they start over each year, completely committed to their Method, and it takes a while for each group of players to fit themselves to the Method in many years. In this season, I think it took a while before Stephon Gilmore absorbed the Method, while it appeared to me that Malcolm Butler was going the other way, sometimes trying to make plays rather than adhere to the Method. The former was new to the team, while the latter was playing for a free agent contract. The former had to absorb the Method, while the latter appeared to shift more toward trying to be a standout.