Patriots Wideout Has Harsh Critique Of Team After Saints Rout

FOXBORO, Mass. — Blowout Patriots losses used to be about as frequent as Halley’s Comet. Now, they’re becoming a weekly occurrence.

New England was on the wrong end of a second consecutive rout Sunday, this one a 34-0 spanking by the average-at-best New Orleans Saints at Gillette Stadium. A week earlier, the Patriots lost 38-3 to the Cowboys in Dallas, meaning two of the four 30-plus-point losses (playoffs included) in the 24-year Bill Belichick era happened in the last seven days.

The Patriots offense, which was supposed to improve this season under new coordinator Bill O’Brien, again was nonexistent in the franchise’s first shutout loss since 2016. Mac Jones and company have gone 10 straight quarters without a touchdown.

What the heck is going on? Wide receiver Kendrick Bourne was asked a variation of that question after the game. He signed, shook his head and replied: “I don’t know, man.”

“I keep saying it: I feel like we have to work harder,” Bourne said. “More effort. We need more effort. And I’m not speaking of anybody. It just feels like we need to want it more. That’s just the energy out there. We need more energy.”

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Bourne drove home that message several times during his postgame media scrum.

“We’ve got to practice better, practice harder, work harder,” he said. “… It’s all about hard work. I feel like we’ve got to work harder in practice. We’ve got to try harder and just do better individually, personally and as a group.”

Bourne said he “believes in the guys we’ve got” and in the plays O’Brien is calling. The results, though, have not been there. After a promising summer, the Patriots’ offensive output has gotten progressively lower each week, from 20 points in a Week 1 loss to Philadelphia, to 17 in Week 3, then 15, then 3, then Sunday’s goose egg.

New England also fell behind by double digits in the first half of all four of their losses, with turnovers mainly to blame for those poor starts. The pick-six New Orleans scored to open the scoring Sunday marked the fourth time this season and third time in two weeks that a Jones turnover was returned for a touchdown.

“I feel like the plays were there,” said Bourne, who caught two of five targets for a team-high 43 yards in the loss. “We’ve just got to make them. Sometimes we’ve got to make harder catches or whatever it may be, but I feel like the plays were there. A lot of them showed themselves. We’ve just got to finish.”

Changes need to be made for the Patriots, who now sit at 1-4, to have any chance of salvaging their season. But how do you fix effort? And if players weren’t sufficiently motivated to begin with, why would that change as the team falls further out of playoff contention?

New England will look for a much-needed bounce-back performance when it visits the Las Vegas Raiders next Sunday.