Vince Wilfork put a new spin on an old saying inside the visitor's locker room at Sun Life Stadium late Sunday afternoon.
"It's not how you start," he said. "It's how you finish. We started (expletive), but we'll get better."
The captain on the Patriots defensive line tried to see the positive in his team's performance after it allowed 192 yards rushing on 5.2 yards per carry, helping give the Dolphins a 33-20 win in the season-opener. There wasn't much.
"Anytime someone gets over 200 yards rushing on you it's a problem up front," Wilfork said. "We gotta figure it out. We will. It's tough losing, but at the same time I'm not going to put my head down. It's not the end of the world. We'll get better and I have all the confidence in the world that we will."
Wilfork was flanked by young players on the defensive line for long stretches of Sunday, including rookie first-round pick Dominique Easley, second-year man Joe Vellano and Sealver Siliga. None of them had much success in stopping Miami's ground game. Knowshon Moreno, who rushed for 224 yards against the Patriots as a member of the Broncos last season, ran for 134 yards and a touchdown on 24 carries.
The Patriots defense may have already been broken before Moreno's fourth-quarter four-yard score, but it seemed a fitting snap-shot of the performance of New England's run defense. Both Wilfork and Siliga appeared to have Moreno stopped behind the line of scrimmage, but he ran through their tackles and then plowed through a couple of shoulder tackles near the goal line for a score that gave the Dolphins a 10-point lead.
"Everything they did, we knew," Wilfork said. "I thought we had a good game plan for it. Obviously we didn't. Anytime somebody can run the ball like that it's not good. We gotta go back to the drawing board."
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The Patriots were among the league's worst in rushing defense last season (they ranked 30th in rush yards allowed per game), but that came with players like Wilfork and Jerod Mayo injured for the majority of the season.
Wilfork believes that there are better things to come for this defense, but he knows they're not going to happen on a whim.
"We have to do better," he said. "We can't hold our heads down. It's a long season. We definitely have to get better, and we will get better."