FOXBOROUGH – Last week should have been an aberration for the defense.

We hope.

The issues in the red zone against Jacksonville (five trips, five touchdowns) were obviously a problem, but through three games New England’s defense has been just fine. The Pats rank 16th in red zone defense (opponents have scored 57% of the time, largely skewed by last week), third in points allowed per game (17.9) and fifth in yards given up (284.9 per game),

Still, the performance Trevor Lawrence and the Jaguars put on inside the 20s raises some immediate questions.

So, was there anything specific on Sunday that coaches have harped on this week?

I asked both defensive coordinator Zak Kuhr and outside linebackers coach Mike Smith on Thursday during their usual availability after practice.

“I would say it’s always all encompassing,” Kuhr said, “We’ve got to improve from this past week, youn know? We made improvement from the end of last year to the beginning of this year and we didn’t play our best down there. We’ve got to be able to adjust, change up some looks and help ourselves a little bit more. We’ve got to play with some better technique and we’ve got to do our best to not allow them to get down there…improve our first, second down and third down. We had some third downs down there, but we’ve got to improve all around…again, every week, I always critique myself first and what I could have done better to help those guys be bin better positions. They would tell you too, they take ownership in their job and doing their job.

“But, sometimes that leads to some creativity the next week and maybe we give some different looks that can help these guys out.”

Smith echoed the same sentiments.

“It all works together,” he said. “It’s never one position group or the other. The better the rush, the better the coverage. The better the coverage, better the rush.

“So, we’ve all got to get better at that and work together.”

With uncertainty surrounding the status of Christian Barmore and Christian Gonzalez (both did not practice Thursday for the second day in a row), things could already be much harder for the defense going into Orchard Park.

The last thing they can afford to do is allow Josh Allen and the Bills to replicate what the Jags did in the red zone last week, or it’ll be a long, miserable afternoon again.