FOXBOROUGH — In describing the personnel on his son’s woeful 2020 Patriots offense, Cecil Newton offered a colorful and very specific description.
“You had a (Honda) Civic, man. You had a 2002 red Civic with a yellow passenger door with a bungee cord holding that door,” Cam Newton’s father said. “It was a four-cylinder and there wasn’t but three cylinders firing.”
If the 2020 Patriots offense was a beat-up Civic, the current group is a 1972 Ford Pinto with a rusted out engine. Not even a quarterback change could jumpstart it, as evidenced by Sunday afternoon’s abysmal showing. With Bailey Zappe at the helm, the Patriots were shut out at home (again) by the Chargers, 6-0.
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Los Angeles came into the game with the NFL’s 32nd-ranked defense. Let that sink in for a second. They were dead last in yardage allowed, and the Patriots couldn’t muster a single point against them. At home.
Newton’s hard-to-watch bunch in 2020 averaged 20.4 points per game. The current group is sitting at 12.3. They’re on pace to be the NFL’s worst scoring offense since the 2011 St. Louis Rams; it’s been over a decade since the league has seen this much futility.
“Super frustrating, not being able to go out there – defense holds them to six points and for us not to be able to go out there and put us anything on the board is tough. I feel bad for those guys on the defensive ball,” Ezekiel Elliott lamented.
On Sunday afternoon, the Patriots became the first team since the 1938 Chicago Cardinals to allow 10 points or fewer in three straight games and lose all three. New England’s defense held Justin Herbert to six points — both field goals came on short fields — and it still wasn’t enough because of how bleak things have gotten on offense.
“We haven’t held up our end of the bargain, for sure,” Hunter Henry said. “They’re playing really well right now. I mean, that was a really good offense and holding them to six points — I mean, the conditions were the conditions, but we’ve got to find a way to execute better.”
Ultimately, this falls on Bill Belichick, who assembled the roster and watched Mac Jones regress all the way out of the starting role. The 2021 first-rounder looks broken, perhaps irreparably.
Against the Chargers, Zappe offered a reminder that the failures aren’t all on the quarterback though. He went 13-of-25 for 141 yards, took five sacks, and never set foot in the red zone. The one time the Patriots entered field goal range, Zappe went down for back-to-back sacks to knock them out of it.
“That’s totally on me,” Zappe said. “I’ve got to understand where we’re at on the field. I have to understand that we have points, and I have to understand plays – it’s done. There’s nobody open. I’ve just got to throw the ball away. I just tried to do too much, and that’s on me.”
Like Jones before him, there was nothing Zappe could do to spark this offense, and though Belichick elevated Malik Cunningham, he glued the exciting rookie to the bench.
“We gave Mac the opportunity to work through his progression with the offense. Obviously we hadn’t had a lot of production,” Belichick said. “I thought Bailey deserved a chance to play, so he played today.”
Will Zappe play again on Thursday night in Pittsburgh?
“We just finished the game,” Belichick deflected. “I didn’t even start on Pittsburgh yet.”
It doesn’t matter. This offense belongs in the junkyard, no matter the quarterback.
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