For the second straight week, Tom Brady watched one of his top playmakers lost for a large swath of the season.
Last week, shifty back Dion Lewis went down with an ACL injury. Sunday it was reliable Julian Edelman who left with a broken bone in his foot that will keep him out 6-8 weeks, NFL Media's Albert Breer reported, per a source briefed on the injury.
The dynamic pass-catcher was on pace for the second 1,000-yard season of his career prior to the injury. On Monday morning, Brady went with the Coach Boone response when asked on WEEI-FM how the Pats would replace Edelman.
"When someone's really integral to part of basically everything you're doing, and then you lose that person, it may take a little bit to kind of figure out how you can move things around and get comfortable with what you're doing, because you want to have a lot of confidence in the things that you're doing," Brady said.
"That's just the way kind of it is. There's nothing that's really seamless when you lose a great player. When it's someone that's been the leading receiver on your team for multiple years and you lose them, it's not like you go, 'OK, well, let just put someone else in.' He's too good of a player for that. You've just got to kind of find your way to make some adjustments. I think we just made some critical plays when we needed to, which was really important down the stretch, certainly defensively, and special teams we did. And on offense I thought we just did enough."
New England's offense wasn't the same after Edelman exited on the last play of the first quarter. The Pats gained 137 yards in the first frame and 269 total in the final three. Brady was 5 of 6 on third down (83 percent) with Edelman on the field and 2 of 8 (25 percent) without him, via the Providence Journal's Mark Daniels.
Brady dismissed that Danny Amendola could just slide over and fill Edelman's role, noting that the two are different types of players. As is the norm with Bill Belichick's teams, they'll plug in different players, adjust their game plan to what fits them best and continue to roll on towards the playoffs.
"We'll need to find different ways to produce with the guys that are on the field," Brady said matter-of-factly.
