The Patriots have lost two games in a row for the first time in a while, and clearly they have some issues. But they were in both these games at the end, unlike their two losses last year. Still, let’s take a look at the issues, what caused them, and what, if anything, can be done.

On defense, the Patriots really lack personnel in the defensive backfield. McCourty has regressed from last year, their 3rd/4th corners are free agents off the street, and they have a rotation of players at safety next to Patrick Chung. These are all because of personnel decisions made by Belichick (letting Jarrad Page go, cutting James Sanders, cutting Leigh Bodden, drafting the injury-prone Ras-I Dowling, etc). Their other big issue is that the defensive coaching has been very poor. Against the Steelers they played a very vanilla soft zone defense that really gave them no chance. At least against the Giants they changed things up, showed some different looks, dropped Mark Anderson into coverage, and blitzed a few times. And they held the Giants scoreless through the first half and to 10 points through 3 quarters.  There’s nothing that can be done about the Pats personnel except to hope that the players improve. But the coaching schemes can be better, hopefully we see more of the creative defense from the Giants game than the plain defense played against the Steelers.

On offense, there are number of issues. The offensive line is pretty sub-par outside of Mankins and Waters. Connoly was not good enough to be a starting guard (which is why they signed Waters), and he’s not great as a center either. And the tackles have not been so hot either. At WR, there’s nobody after Wes Welker. Deion Branch can’t get separation, OchoCinco can’t really do it either and doesn’t know the offense. I’m still hopeful for Taylor Price, but he hasn’t seen much action. Finally, Brady looks off, making lots of poor decisions and poor throws. Here, we can hope some WR develops (Taylor Price?) and I think it would also help if the offense ran the ball more (letting the O-line be more aggressive, taking some pressure off Brady).

Special teams have also been bad. The pats have no threat at kick returner (Woodhead returned every kickoff to the 20 or 21 yard line), have missed 2 FGs in the past two weeks, and fumbled two returns. I liked McCourty’s kickoff return at the end of the game, I hope he gets more opportunities. Otherwise it’s just execution and ball security.

The solvable parts of the Patriots problems come down to two things:

• Execution
• Coaching Scheme

Hopefully we’ll see improvement in those areas this week against the Jets.