SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The Patriots’ quickest path to victory on Sunday may very well come down to the work of their defensive tackles.
They play with extension, they play with power, they play with quickness. They’ve got athleticism coming out of the earholes. And attitude? This group may lead the team in that regard.
“We all some killers,” Christian Barmore told me. “We take our emotions out in the game because we love how hard this is. We like some lions, man. We ready to hunt.”
“DGAF (editor: Don’t give a bleep),” Milton Williams added. “We just don’t care. We don’t care who you got or what you’re running.”
“We know how good we are. We know what we can do,” added Khyiris Tonga.
Mike Vrabel loves to use the word “intentionality,’ especially when it comes to the team’s player acquisition process. To him, it isn’t just about finding players who can fit the system the head coach envisioned; it’s also about the personalities. This room has both.
How they got here is a different story. Barmore was a 2nd-round pick out of Alabama who would have easily gone in the first if there weren’t questions about his maturity level. Williams played for Louisiana Tech, got picked in the third round, but was generally viewed as a rotational piece, not someone who would command $100 million in free agency.
But this goes well beyond that dynamic duo. The Patriots come at you in waves, although they’re doing it with other teams’ castoffs. Tonga is on his 4th team in 5 years. For Cory Durden, undrafted, it’s his 3rd in 3. Leonard Taylor got let go by the Jets after he also didn’t get selected. A year before, some draftniks believed Taylor was a first-round pick.
“We have a lot of guys that were thrown to the side or were told they’re not good enough, and the team went in another direction,” Williams said. “We’ve got a lot of guys that are just playing for each other … and dominate when we get a chance.”
“There’s competition within our team, and there’s competition against the guys we’re playing,” noted Durden. “So you just never want it to be a drop off. And as a whole, we feel like we’re the best D tackles in the league. We’re the best overall D tackle room in the NFL. That’s kind of our goal. We play with a chip on our shoulders. We want to show that every week.”
That’s truly come into focus as the season has gone on. Despite joking that Williams would play significantly more snaps than he did at his previous stop in Philadelphia, Vrabel and the defensive staff have managed reps, with only Barmore above 65%. Some of that has been injury-related. Williams missed five with a high-ankle sprain, while Tonga and rookie Joshua Farmer lost multiple games as well. But as Williams has admitted, that time off, combined with a manageable workload, has allowed him to feel fresher than he should this late in the season.
“That’s how you build a
