While Tom Brady is preparing to play in his 10th Super Bowl, his old team is already a month into the off-season.
The New England Patriots finished 7-9 in their first season without the superstar quarterback, who set their worst record since 2000 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2008.
On SiriusXM NFL Radio, the defensive approach of Patriots and co-captain Lawrence Guy paraphrased head coach Bill Belichick’s message to the team after the uncharacteristically disappointing campaign.
“Coach is going to do what he has to do,” Guy said when asked about the Patriots’ plan. “When we left our retirement meeting, it was one of those things like, ‘Hey, what’s going to happen next? “And (Belichick) was like, ‘You have to understand. It was a season we did not predict. We hit COVID. We had a lot of situations in our team. There were a lot of new people. We have not won (the number of) matches we want to win. But that doesn’t mean we just put our tails under our buttocks and just walk away. That means you strive to be better next year. ‘
‘I’ve never been to an organization where we, win or lose, came out (not) the following year like,’ OK, we need to be better. ” We won a Super Bowl? We look at the corrections from the Super Bowl. We won it, but look at all these bad plays that we need to improve so we don’t have to do it again next year. ‘And that’s what kind of person Coach (Belichick) is. We are going to improve regardless of the situation. It may not be the result that some people do not want, win or lose, but it is going to get better every week. “
As Guy noted, the pandemic had a definite effect on the Patriots season.
First, they lose eight players in the NFL Series, including rookies Dont’a Hightower, Patrick Chung and Marcus Cannon. Then quarterback Cam Newton tested positive for COVID-19 in early October, causing an outbreak that led to two game postponements and nearly two full weeks of canceled practice.
The Patriots went through a four-game losing streak after Newton’s diagnosis and never climbed above 0.500 again.
Guy despised the impact of Non-England’s opt-outs.
“There were a few players who chose, and there were a few players who performed where you could see their potential and see how they were going to strive for who they were going to be and who they were going to be,” he said. said on SiriusXM. ‘But at the end of the day, the players who did not pick were on the field in the game, so they did not win or lose a game for us.
‘The players who were on the field are the people who won or lost the game. The games we lost, we lost as a team. The matches we won, we won as a team. It was not one unit or one play. … This year we had a challenge we had to face, and some of the challenges were nail biting. It was the last play, the last term, the last series, and we could not finish it. This is how I look at it. ”
The Patriots lost four games by one count, but dropped five others by double figures, including the loss to the San Francisco 49ers in Week 7, Los Angeles Rams in Week 14 and Buffalo Bills in Week 16.
It’s unclear whether Guy, who has been with the Patriots since 2017, will be back next season. He will become a free agent in March, but has expressed a desire to sign again.
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