USA Today

FOXBOROUGH – Good teams find ways to overcome bad performances and win games. Unfortunately for the Patriots, they are not good enough to overcome penalties, missed opportunities and poor situational coaching and that is why they lost to the Dolphins on Sunday.

New England controlled most of the game against the Tua-less Dolphins but penalties, inconsistent offensive play calling and an inability to finish drives in the red zone proved to be costly.

The penalties in particular point to a bigger issue. The coaching staff’s message of being disciplined and focused on game day during the week isn’t resonating and as a result, it reflects on the field with all of the mental and physical errors they are committing.

When asked about the penalties after Sunday’s game, Patriots coach Jerod Mayo simply said the team cannot commit that many penalties.

“That we cannot do it. We preach all the time about pre-snap and post-snap penalties. It just wasn’t a good day.”

It is not good enough to simply say that. The Patriots have been undisciplined in all phases of the game for the past three weeks. Whether it is poor fundamentals, miscommunication or lacking situational awareness, they look like a team that in not prepared to play.

Ultimately that falls on Mayo and the staff. Simply saying that he needs to be better and that the team needs to be better is getting old. It needs to start showing up on tape because right now, the Patriots are 1-4 and getting worse by the week.

Before Mayo and his staff focus on the X’s and O’s this week, they need to focus on the fundamentals and playing smarter football. There needs to be more accountability individually and collectively.

Mayo by his own admission admitted in his opening statement on Sunday that the team is not fundamentally sound and needs to improve in several areas if they are going to turn things around.

“Obviously a very disappointing game. I think there’s no question we’re tough, but we just have to be better from an execution standpoint. We’ve got to be able to execute in situations. We’ve got to be able to execute on a play-by-play basis, and we didn’t do that. I would also say as the game wore on, our fundamentals began to slip, and that can be a combination of things. We’ll watch the film with a critical guy, and we’ve just got to put a better team out there.”

It is time to stop talking and start working. It is one thing to lose games because the opponent is more talented. It is another thing to lose games because the better is physically better but your team lack of talent and is fundamentally unsound and undisciplined.

The honeymoon period is over for Mayo. The focus will now shift to how he and his staff can fix this situation. The time to be better is now. Enough talking about being better. It has to start showing up in the week to week performance of the team.

It is one thing to lack talent and it is another to be poorly coached. The Patriots are both right now.