What happened to the Patriots running game Sunday?

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It was no secret that the Green Bay Packers had one of the worst run defenses in the league going into Sunday's match-up against the Patriots. Ranked 30th in the league prior to the game, the popular opinion was that Patriots Offensive Coordinator Josh McDaniels would employ a heavy ground attack against the Packers defense. Visions of LeGarrette Blount bulldozing Clay Matthews quickly vanished as the game unfolded.

The Patriots suffered two quick drives that resulted in punts and they fell behind in time of possession which made it difficult for the them to execute their game plan. In fact as Coach Bill Belichick pointed out, the team struggled all day on third down, "Offensively and defensively we weren't able to convert on third down as effectively as we needed to, which gave them extra plays, so you can probably say there were a lot of things offensively that we didn't do as much of as we wanted to because we didn't have the ball as much as we would have liked to have had it."

The Patriots managed just four third down conversions Sunday, going 4/10 and conversely allowed the Packers to convert on 10/17 third down opportunities. It led to limited opportunities and forced the Patriots to be more one dimensional than they would've liked. Belichick told the media, "We ended up with some short drives which limited the number of plays that we ran," adding later, "you can look at every group and everything that we did and say ‘Could we have done more of this?' and if we had the ball more and had more plays, we probably would have done more of it, but we didn't."

The Patriots simply couldn't afford to run the ball when they started failing on third down on both sides of the ball. To remain balanced, they need to be better on third down the remainder of the season.

The full transcript of Bill Belichick's Monday conference call can be found here.

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