Skins' games vs. AFC East teams help Pats prepare

By Nick St. Denis

The Washington Redskins faced the New York Jets last weekend, and that was beneficial to the New England Patriots, who face the Redskins Sunday.

During his Wednesday press conference, Patriots coach Bill Belichick discussed the advantages of Team A facing a team that has already played a team in Team A's division.

Make sense? I'll let The Hoodie explain.

"I think it's a little bit easier to see some of the matchups," Belichick said. "We know the Jets and so we see how they match up against their players. That will be better than them playing, like the week before when they played Seattle, who we don't really know anybody on Seattle and we're not familiar with Seattle. But I think you can see, like when they play the Jets, ‘Okay, this is what they're doing.' We see how they're trying to attack the Jets because we know the Jets. I do think there's some value in that."

The Jets defeated the Redskins, 34-19. Washington also faced the Buffalo Bills and Miami Dolphins, to whom it lost 23-0 and 20-9, respectively.

"We've also seen them play Buffalo of course, and Miami - all three division games," Belichick said. "Those are helpful because we know our teams in the division and we can kind see, ‘This is what they're after, this why they're doing this, this is why they're doing that.' It makes more sense than watching them play the Arizonas and the Seattles and teams like that that we're a lot less familiar with. There is some value to that.

"You study every game but it's a lot easier to watch the teams that we know, and we've played Dallas and we've played Philadelphia and we've played the Giants, so there's some degree of useful information there because of what we know about the other teams."

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