FOXBORO, Mass. -- The New York Jets needed a great game from Le'Veon Bell to have any chance of upsetting the heavily favored New England Patriots on Sunday, but Bill Belichick's defense did a great job shutting down the star running back in a 30-14 win.
“Those guys played disciplined," Bell said. "We just had a lot of negative plays where we made a mistake. Of course, the running won’t look as efficient because we had a lot of negative runs, too. We had a lot of positive runs, we did our job on a couple plays. Sometimes we have got to stop with the negative plays and hurting ourselves.”
Bell was limited to just 35 yards on 18 carries (1.9 yards per rush). He's also one of the best pass-catching running backs in the NFL, but he managed to tally just four receptions for 28 yards Sunday.
Belichick noted it took a team effort to stop a player as talented as Bell.
"Just good team defense. Nobody can stop him. You can't put one or two guys on him," the Patriots head coach explained. "You've got to do a good job of defeating blockers, staying in our gaps and then tackling. He's a great back. He's got tremendous balance, power, vision. It just takes everybody working together on that. Our players really did a good job of being disciplined and tackling."
The Patriots were able to stop so many of Bell's runs for little or no gain, and this ultimately put the Jets in a lot of third-and-long situations that were tough to convert against a New England defense playing at an extremely high level. The result was the Jets going an abysmal 0-for-12 on third down.
New England Patriots
"There’s a few things in the run game that we got to clean up, that we got to give our guys a better chance on," Jets head coach Adam Gase said. "But we just didn’t give ourselves a chance. We can’t go third-and-10. We go third-and-10, we’re not going to convert."
The Jets enter their bye week at 0-3, and what began as a promising 2019 season now looks destined to end without playoff action for the ninth consecutive year.
"We got to look at a lot of things over this bye week," Gase said. "I mean, I never thought I would say, ‘Week 4 bye week, I’m glad it’s here’. But, I mean, we got to address some things. We got to figure out what’s going on. We’re not, we’re not in sync. We’re not doing a good job of working together. We’re kind of all over the place. So we got to get that fixed."
The Jets better get things fixed ASAP, because the Patriots might not be the only good team in the AFC East this season. The Buffalo Bills, who beat the Jets on the road in Week 1, are 3-0 entering next Sunday's showdown versus the Patriots.
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