CHICAGO — By now, we know that Drake Maye dazzles.
That Christian Gonzalez can lock down a No. 1 receiver like he’s a walking home security system.
And that the Patriots, even as they stumble and bumble, and the rest of us grumble, can pull off a surprise or two.
Just ask the Jets and Bengals.
But at 2-7, could they win boring? Could they simply show up, wrestle the team in front of them to the ground and choke them out?
Well, don’t ask the Bears. They’re out cold.
Not only did the Patriots out-class Chicago in a 19-3 win Sunday, they overcame a more talented and desperate opponent. More often than not, talent and desperation win are enough in the NFL. With their season teetering at 4-4 after two straight losses, the Bears had every reason to expect they would roll one of the worst teams in football and win pulling away.
But they didn’t. They couldn’t.
They couldn’t because the Patriots were the tougher team Sunday. The more resilient team. The smarter team.
Finally.
Ja’Lynn Polk, everyone’s favorite punching bag since he started dropping passes like he was wearing boxing mitts, bounced back to catch the Pats’ only touchdown Sunday on a stroke of coaching genius. During the week, the staff discovered the Bears were susceptible to the type of play they called on Polk’s touchdown: a play-action pass in the tight red zone.
“We felt like that was one of their weaknesses and they bit on it,” Polk told me, “and we scored.”
Perhaps that weakness was exclusive to cornerback Tyrique Stevenson, who watched the run fake instead of eyeing Polk, who initially blocked right and then slipped past him for an easy touchdown. Or the Bears’ weakness was more widespread. Whatever it was, Polk cracked the NFL’s third-ranked red zone defense in the process, and by scoring, gave Maye one more touchdown pass than Caleb Williams has thrown in three games.
Entering the season, expectations for Williams were higher than any rookie quarterback in recent memory, thanks not only to his status as the No. 1 overall pick, but the great lengths the Bears had gone to support him.
Trading for Keenan Allen. Drafting Rome Odunze. Signing D’Andre Swift. Adding a new offensive coordinator in Shane Waldron, the hottest name on the market last January.
How’s that going, Caleb?
Williams, by the way, looks no closer to becoming the NFL passer scouts envisioned, but rather his college self reliving a lowlight reel on repeat; scrambling and scrambling and extending plays past their breaking point, all in the name of chasing the big play. Williams took nine sacks on Sunday, a franchise record for the Patriots, who aside from assigning an unexpected spy, basically let him unravel on his own.
Williams remains his own worst enemy, something that can’t be said about Maye. His game has matured.
Maye, for the most part, has shed the reckless hero ball that likewise defined most of his final collegiate season. Sure, he tossed a silly interception in the first quarter and almost ripped another in the fourth. But Maye’s development is real, and it is spectacular.
It’s in his feet, his reads, his mechanics. Sunday’s victory, unforeseen as it may have been — I certainly didn’t pick the Patriots — was months in the making. And Maye didn’t even play great.
But he won.
Sunday showed yet again that winning football and supporting a quarterback are more about glue than glitz; about the unseen. The extra practice reps and long nights and film study and drill work.
The Patriots started the week with a physical, hard practice on Wednesday. But it wasn’t clean enough. So Maye called his teammates out, they responded the next two days and again on Sunday.
“We played the football that I know we’re capable of,” said Pats linebacker Jahlani Tavai.
Charging into the rest of the season, team leadership is dead set on feeding young playlers more playing time. On Sunday, the Pats benched Kendrick Bourne to clear more room at the table. But rookies like Polk must show them something, either at practice or in games, otherwise the coaching staff will lose buy-in from the veterans whose snaps are being sacrificed for the good of the franchise.
And if the staff can’t strike that balance or win along the way, they will lose everything.
But Sunday, they won. And after wins like that, the ship stabilizes. Rookies grow. Veterans celebrate. Coaches relax, and winning feels within an arm’s reach again.
“It was more about us proving to ourselves that that’s what we can play and how we can play,” Tavai said. “And now we’ve got to build. I’m proud of these guys, man. They held it down, and now we’ve got to build.”
As they dive back into another week of preparation, back behind closed doors and into dark film rooms and the back of practice fields, the Patriots will become unseen again.
So the next time we see them, what will they have to show us?
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