The New England Patriots extended their win streak to three straight victories on Sunday against the New York Jets, but that doesn’t mean they are fully satisfied either.
In fact, for head coach Mike Vrabel, a win was not a foregone conclusion given his team’s performance. He event went so far as to use the L-word to describe the game: lucky.
“We’re lucky to win, is probably where I’d start,” Vrabel said during his postgame presser. “But we’re happy that we won. We’ll enjoy it for about an hour, and then we’re going to focus on the next task.”
What exactly did he mean when talking about being lucky, though?
“Fortunate, whatever — we just didn’t play very well,” Vrabel added. “We tried to beat ourselves, but we made enough plays in critical situations to help us get through here today.”
The Patriots entered Week 6 coming off their two best games of the season. They defeated a well-rounded Bills team on the road 29-26 to emphatically leave their 1-2 start behind them, and the following week thoroughly dismantled a Raiders team that had won three of its first four games.
The arrow was pointing up for New England heading into the Jets game, but in Vrabel’s eyes it didn’t do the same during the eventual 26-19 victory on Sunday afternoon.
“You have to be able to continue to improve, and I don’t feel like we did,” he said. “We won, which is the most important thing. We just — I don’t think we improved from what we had shown the previous two weeks, and I have to figure out why. That’s my job. My job’s to get us to win and also to get us to improve.”
“There are definitely things we’ve got to clean up for sure,” said cornerback Christian Gonzalez when asked about his head coach’s remarks. “We’ve got to clean up two-minute drives. We’ve got to clean that up. And in the backend, we’ve got to do what we do as a defense. We’ve got to not let them drive down the field, get down there and get points. The offense did an amazing job getting down the field, taking time off. The defense, we didn’t do our part. But we got out with a win and that’s what matters.”