While Tom Brady yells at his receivers on the field you sit on your couch yelling at all of them as if they can hear you through the T.V. Frustration starts to set in and your mind starts to wander. Do I even want to watch this anymore? I really don’t want to see them lose. This game is going on forever. I can’t watch, it’s painful. Thoughts like these are running through New England Patriots fans heads more this year than usual.

These fans are used to their team winning on a regular basis after making deep playoff runs almost every season after great success in the past decade. A lot of the games they play are “easy” wins and the score can be very one-sided in the Patriots favor, but this season looks like it might play out a little differently.

Over the summer The Patriots let go of tight end Aaron Hernandez almost immediately after he was arrested for murder on June 26th. Hernandez was a major factor in the success of the Patriots offense. Together with tight end Rob Gronkowski they have seemed like an almost unstoppable duo, always receiving large amount of touchdown passes. Quarterback Tom Brady always had lots of options when deciding who to throw the ball too, but with Hernandez in jail, and Gronkowski still out with an injury, some of those targets have been eliminated.

New Patriots player, Danny Amendola, has also been playing on and off due to reoccurring injury issues. When Hernandez got arrested back in June fans were worried about how the offense was going to run, but Amendola seemed promising and looked like he could help the team a lot. He is known for being injury prone, and that has proven to be true so far this season as he was out again this week with a severe muscle tear, but when he is playing he is the solid player everyone was expecting him to be. Key players seem to be disappearing and while we wait for Gronkowski and Amendola to return other players have to keep stepping up.

Julian Edelman, the jack of all trades on The Patriots has really stepped up in these few weeks and filling in the gap of other key offensive players. Christopher Price from WEEI.com wrote “the former college quarterback has caught 20 of his team’s 48 completed passes (all of them from Brady), or 42 percent of the total receptions”. Edelman has played so many different positions and can be used for many things it’s perfect that he can be such a quality receiver. Tom Brady, while speaking about Edelman, said, “He did a great job, he caught the ball, caught it in traffic. He really did a great job of really being dependable out there.” The question is how long can Edelman keep carrying the weight of the team on his back?

There are a lot of new players on the team this season, and for some of them this is their first time playing pro football. As The Patriots play more games we can only hope that they start to catch on and feel more comfortable in this new environment and start to thrive. Watching these past two games was almost painful at times and you could tell veteran players like Tom Brady were getting frustrated with the rookies. While talking about trying to keep his patience with them Brady said “Sometimes it’s what I do with my 3-year-old [son Benjamin] too, and he doesn’t listen either, You try to just hang in there.” (http://www.nepatriotslife.com/2013/09/tom-brady-says-communicating-with.html)

Tempers ran a little high last game and Brady ended up yelling at his offense, especially at his wide receivers during their last game against the Jets, because they just couldn’t seem to hold onto the ball and score. You can tell that this process of players trying to figure out what to do is frustrating and hard to adjust too for a team that has had so much success in recent years. This new team is going to take some time to click with each other and adjust, but they have won their first three games this season and hopefully once key players recover from injury and everyone becomes more comfortable, the Patriots team that fans are used to seeing will return for good.