FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – On Nov. 11, the NFL went sideways for a minute when a halfway decent Tennessee Titans team lit up the Patriots, 34-10, ending a six-game winning streak in which New England beat the Chiefs, Colts and Packers at home and Chicago on the road.
The only plausible conclusion one could draw from this sloppy disaster was that the Patriots Dynasty had ended sharply and swiftly sometime after Nov. 4’s 31-17 victory over the Packers at Gillette Stadium. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick had used up the last of their respective life forces, and whatever magic had made the team so good for so long had vanished. Total ineptitude against the Titans had revealed their sorry fate.
Inexplicably, the Patriots won their next two games, each by two touchdowns.
And then came more road trouble with New England losing at Miami on a freak play and coming up short in the final minutes at Pittsburgh. Perhaps the Patriots Dynasty had only died outside of Foxborough, Mass. The Patriots could not win on the road. It was settled.
Or maybe … this was a mystery that transcended the mere observation of box scores and travel logs. Something else was at play. Something literally rooted in soil and rolled out in a fine shade of green across the basin of NFL stadiums. This was about a temperamental, inconsistent and unpredictable playing surface called Bermuda grass. It is the surface the Patriots will play on in Sunday’s AFC Championship game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, and the Patriots have played their worst football on that surface for years.
Since 2013, the Patriots have an 18-5 record (.730) in road and neutral-site games played on artificial turf. In that same span, they are 13-14 (.481) in games played on grass. When they play on Kentucky bluegrass, a cold-climate surface, they are 6-5 with a 29.05 DVOA (the efficiency rating calculated by Football Outsiders), but when they play on Bermuda grass, they are 7-9 with a DVOA of minus-9.15.
In other words, for the last six seasons, Bermuda grass has turned the Patriots into a rough equivalent of the 2017 Buffalo Bills.
The results on Bermuda grass were even more pronounced this season. Four of their five losses were on grass. The three times they played on warm-weather grass (mostly Bermuda), they lost to the Jaguars, Dolphins and Titans. Might that account for those seemingly inexplicably losses to teams that had a collective record of 21-27 (.438)? Meanwhile, the two times the Patriots played on Kentucky bluegrass, they went 1-1, beating the Bears by seven and losing to Pittsburgh by the same figure.
The Patriots had a DVOA of minus-47.16 in those three games on warm-weather grasses (Miami switched from Bermuda to a genetically modified strain called Platinum TE Paspalum in 2016). Their DVOA on bluegrass this season? 18.95.
Patriots players were reticent this week to push much blame onto the surfaces, but several acknowledged that one issue with grass is that it is far less consistent from one stadium to another when compared to turf. Grass struggles to grow in the shade of stadiums, sod can come loose under heavy usage and fields may drain unpredictably after certain weather conditions. If you think of defenders slipping and stumbling during the Miami Miracle, the offensive line struggling in Jacksonville and Stephon Gilmore seemingly losing a step against Corey Davis in Tennessee, perhaps it could make sense that the Patriots’ struggles on the road have something to do with the field.
“Our struggles on the road have nothing to do with the field, I’ll tell you that,” Patriots special teams captain Matthew Slater said Friday. Now in his 11th season, Slater is one of the longest-tenured members of the team, but he was surprised to learn that the Pats have a much better record on road turf (.730 winning percentage) than grass (.600) since 2007.
Earlier this week, Belichick said that part of the team’s weekly preparation is “to know the fields that we’re playing in and what the conditions are.”
Belichick said there are times when poor field conditions may affect what the Patriots can do, and that this is something they do prepare for, both by examining the field prior to the game and practicing in various surface conditions.
“I’d say during the year we’ve practiced in most every condition we could get,” Belichick said. “And it would be pretty unusual for something to come up that we haven’t at least approximated in the practice setting so that we can refer back to (it).”
As it happens, the Chiefs were forced to resod portions of their field this week after 10 inches of snow accumulated last weekend. Through his Twitter account, Chiefs groundskeeper Travis Hogan said that hauling the snow away on the sideline necessitated the new grass.
“Whatever it is when we get there, it will probably be something a little bit different than we’ve seen all year,” Slater said. “And we’ll have to deal with it.”
(Dave Brown is a freelance correspondent who covers the Patriots for the Monitor. Follow him on Twitter @ThatDaveBrown.)