The trivia answer you never expected to see.

Q: What do the New Orleans Saints, San Francisco 49ers and St. Louis Rams have in common?

A: Those are the only 3 teams to have allowed more points through the first 5 weeks of the NFL season than the 2-time defending Super Bowl Champion Patriots.


The Pats have not played good defense, for the most part, this season. They've allowed WAY too many big plays, they've done an awful job on 3rd down getting off the field, and they've only got 1 interception in 5 games.

After the week 2 loss in Carolina, there was a lot of criticism of the offense and comments about how "the defense played pretty well." And it did, in some regards. The problem was that every time the Panthers got the ball inside the Patriots 30, they scored a touchdown. Every time. So they had great completion stats, and not much total yardage allowed, but never held Carolina to field goals if they got anywhere near the goal-line. And that contributed greatly to the 10-point loss. If they'd stopped Carolina in the red zone a couple of times, that would have been a different 4th quarter.

None of which is to say that they won't fix it. I suspect that they will - they'll certainly make it better. But it needs to get a lot better in the next 12 weeks to get to where they want to go...