The New England Patriots’ season opener against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday had a little bit of something for everybody. There was a lot to digest in the team’s 25-20 loss that saw them come up just short of erasing a 16-0 first quarter deficit.
Coming off of the offseason and training camp there were a lot of people with preconceived notions about this team. Some positive, and some negative. By the time the clock hit 0:00 on Sunday afternoon at Gillette Stadium, those both with glasses half full and glasses half empty likely came away feeling they’d been proven right.
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This game was a real Rorschach test of takes. A Rorschach test, or inkblot test, is a psychological test where subjects are asked to say what they see when shown various pools of ink in no shape in particular. Supposedly, people’s answers to these tests can be used to their examine a person’s personality characteristics. Basically, what you see in the ink shows who you are as a person. Similarly, what people saw in this game says a lot about what kind of fan they are.
The Patriots had their issues Sunday against the Eagles, many of which mirrored last year or going back multiple seasons. But this is a new season and new coaching staff. They have time to fix what ailed them. Do these Patriots deserve the benefit of the doubt given their inability to adjust the past few seasons?
People in the glass-half-empty group will call any attempt to add context to the game ‘excuses’ or say there are no moral victories. People in the glass-half-full group will say the people in the empty group have a ‘bias’ or ‘agenda’ or something like that.
In reality, it’s probably too early to tell from either side. But that’s not how this works. That’s why in the end, there is one clear winner from Sunday’s Patriots performance – 98.5 The Sports Hub. With a game like this, expect the takes from both sides of the spectrum to come flying in hot all week.
Most of the lessons learned about this team from this game are more of the X’s and O’s variety than the ‘team DNA’ variety. Because while the game script may have looked familiar, the schematics of what the Patriots did certainly didn’t. Let’s start there with this week’s takeaways…