The Patriots routed the Raiders 45-17 at Gillette Stadium on Sunday, and they did it while missing multiple starters to injury. Drake Maye still found room to attack the defense, and one of the clearest signs came when Kyle Williams turned a look the Raiders finally gave up into a 49-yard completion.
That is why Patriots news moved fast on a game that could have gone sideways. Josh McDaniels said the Patriots are still running the same plays they used in the first three games, but Sunday showed how much the offense can change when the sequencing changes. In Buffalo, the Patriots had already increased motion, play-actions and unique personnel groupings, and that same adaptability showed up again against a Raiders defense that kept giving Maye chances to throw outside the numbers one on one.
The numbers tell the story of how cleanly the Patriots handled it. The Raiders used single-high coverage on 55.3% of their snaps, but they ran cover zero only twice. One of those cover-zero drop-backs turned into Williams’ 49-yard catch, the play he described by saying, “That was the look we were waiting for.” Williams said the Raiders did not show it early, then gave it up later, and the Patriots were ready when it finally appeared.
The Patriots also protected Maye with formation work that mattered as much as the calls themselves. They used a split-back set to keep him clean, and they leaned on a double sidecar pistol look that let them run play-action without exposing the quarterback. On one sequence, the two tight ends doubled Maxx Crosby before the ball went to the route concept, and another post-dig combination got Chism isolated on a one-on-one across the middle. It was not just aggression. It was controlled aggression.
That is the part that should concern the Raiders most. Their league-high 10.3% cover-zero rate did not translate into the kind of pressure package that usually forces a young quarterback to hesitate, and when they backed off the blitz look, Maye still produced the highest single-game total expected points added of his season at +28.7. The Patriots did not need a perfect health report to play their best offensive game of the season. They needed the right looks, and on Sunday they kept turning those looks into yards.
What comes next is the harder question for the Patriots and anyone trying to defend them. If they can keep creating those same chances with the same core plays, the real test is not whether the offense can score in one game. It is whether opponents can keep them from doing it once they know what is coming.
