Patriots coordinators to use bye week to self-evaluate

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Now that the Patriots are onto their bye week, it comes time for some self-scouting, prior to their Week 10 game against the Buffalo Bills.

Whether it's building on the things that New England is doing well, or fixing some of the team's biggest issues, the Patriots coaching staff will be hard at work to point those things out before they game plan for their next opponent.

"I think there's a lot of different ways you could certainly go, in a bye week. One of the things that anybody will try to do -- and we certainly try to do the best we can at it -- is to identify areas that you need to make some progress in or make some improvements in, or at least make your players aware of some things that we need to try to be better at," said Patriots offensive coordinator Josh MacDaniels in a conference call on Tuesday.

So while self-scouting is already in place, the Patriots coaching staff will be sure to not pile on, when the players return to the facilities on Thursday. There's just not enough time to go over everything.

"You can't hit everything in a bye week, it's too short, in terms of the time that you have with the players," said McDaniels. "But we can find a few things that we feel like can make a difference for us in some area of our game. And that's definitely something that you try to get done.

"I think if you try to tackle 100 things, you probably don't get anything accomplished. So we're in the process now of trying to look back over the first half of the season, and maybe, even more specifically, the last so many games here, and try to focus on some things that we think could make us better, heading into the last eight games."

Defensive coordinator Matt Patricia joined Tuesday's conference call after McDaniels, and he agreed with giving his team a "smaller scope" of the biggest issues at hand, following their self-scouting.

"Obviously that's a big part of this week for us, certainly, is to take a look at everything that we're doing, and obviously try to see some areas where we can improve, and hopefully find some areas where we're doing some things that are also okay and good, and things that we can build off of," said Patricia. "So, we'll certainly take a look at that as well."

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