Patriots chart 2023 offseason course

“Our record is right around .500, which is what it’s been kind of all year,” summed up Bill Belichick on Monday morning in his season-ending Zoom appearance. “With that, some good things and some not-so-good things, so nobody’s satisfied with that. That’s not our goal and we need to try to improve on that, we need to improve on it. So that’s all of us. Accountability everywhere. Starting with me, the coaching staff, players, and each unit are all things that we will address. That process will start probably later today.”

Two kickoff return touchdowns and two big-play touchdowns accounted for all but one of Buffalo’s scores. Mac Jones’ first three-touchdown performance of the season wasn’t enough to keep pace with the quick-strike Bills who continued to torture the Patriots with a variety of “wow” plays. Even with the defense getting their first interception off of Josh Allen since 2020 and two additional forced fumbles that resulted in takeaways, the Patriots couldn’t make things interesting until the end, a common failure this year where they collapsed with potential victory in sight.

This embodied a season of fits and starts and a team that seemed to play their sloppiest in the biggest moments.

While it was a more impressive showing than 2021’s season-ending 30-point defeat that never saw the Bills punt, the Patriots still find themselves in a similar position to where they were a year ago, asking similar questions and now looking up at both the Bills and Dolphins in the division standings. 2022 featured just one win over this year’s playoff teams, last week’s victory over the quarterback-depleted Dolphins, as they’ve found themselves unable to get over the hump against the best teams in the league. In many ways, this feels like a three-year trend, one that has seen the Patriots beat up on plenty of bad teams or ones dramatically altered by injuries, but unable to notch the kind of defining win where they put it all together against a quality opponent at full…