01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, November 29, 2005

BY TOM E. CURRAN
Journal Sports Writer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- There's so much left unsaid by these Patriots right now.

But there will be no Seinfeld-like Festivus Holiday in Foxboro with a cleansing "airing of grievances." The football side of the organization believes there's little benefit to graphic explanation of shortcomings.

"There's a lot of things that could be improved on defense," head coach Bill Belichick said yesterday when confronted with the stat that his team has managed a meager 16 sacks. "That's one of them. You could list a lot of other ones, too."

But he won't.

There are plenty of signals, though, about what the deal is, especially defensively, where the real problem with this team lies.

"You have to trust Bill Belichick and believe what he says," said linebacker Mike Vrabel. "It starts at the top. We have to follow along. Everybody has to prepare better and play better. It all runs downhill, and ultimately it's on the players to go out there and perform as a unit. Not as one or two guys and not as seven or eight guys. There are 11 guys that are willing to go out there and play with each other and understand what they are trying to do to us. At times it is there and at times it is not."

And it doesn't take many times for that to happen to find a good team such as Kansas City smearing your defense's collective face in the mud.

The Chiefs scored on all of their possessions in the first half yesterday. Did Tom Brady play well for the Patriots and help the offense keep pace? Nope. But the flogging he took after Sunday's game is testament to how brilliant a normal Tom Brady Sunday is.

In a lot of NFL cities, when a quarterback has three passes glance off the hands of his receivers and into the arms of defensive backs, the receivers get strung up for not "making a play."

Here, people are so used to Brady putting the ball in Position A, a 24-inch misfire on a throw 20 yards down the field draws shakes of the head and laying of blame.

The Patriots' offense is sloppy and inconsistent right now, but at least there is hope for improvement as Matt Light, Kevin Faulk and Corey Dillon all convalesce.

The defense, it appears, is the defense.

"They're tough to run on," Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil insisted after Sunday's game. "They've got some injuries in the secondary, but those guys up front are mean and lean and tough -- the down linemen and linebackers. Larry [Johnson] had to earn every yard he got and, as you saw, he battled. You can't make a living pounding on them, no matter how good your offensive line is. You'd better get the ball down the field. When you put 420 yards of offense on them you've done a pretty good job."

They are not tough to run on. Forget about the yards-per-carry stats (the Patriots are allowing a respectable 3.8 yards). The front seven may be mean, lean and tough, but that hasn't helped them stop good backs from getting necessary yards anytime they've wanted to.

In 11 games, they Pats have allowed 1,307 yards on the ground on 341 carries. Teams are running the ball better than 33 times a game against them, and it's not just run-out-the-clock carries. The team that ran it most often was Buffalo [39 runs], in a loss.

It's hard to figure why Ty Warren, Vince Wilfork and Richard Seymour haven't been better against the run this year. They were terrific last season -- Warren even seemed to outplay Seymour at times. And Wilfork looked like a guy who could make a run at being one of the league's best point-of-attack defenders.

Reading between the lines, you get a sense that there is not enough trust from player to player right now.

"We expect more cohesiveness," said linebacker Rosevelt Colvin. "We expect guys to play better. But sometimes that's not the result, and that's why we're 6-5 and not 11-0. You're used to one thing and expect one thing and you're not always in the position you used to be. You have to look at it as who we have is who we have. Regardless. You have to play with what you've got. We're inconsistent. Every game. Home or away."

The Patriots feel they can't sell out to take away a team's running attack because their secondary is so vulnerable to the pass.

Yet giving the secondary extra help doesn't seem to be a solution, either, because they get beaten, anyway.

"We're trying to clog holes everywhere," said linebacker and special-teamer Matt Chatham. "Stick one finger here, spring a leak there. Next thing you know, you're drowning.

"There's a culture of winning here," he added. "Guys around here are used to winning and are used to that sensation. We probably know better than anyone what bad football is. We're used to pointing [bad plays] out on film, seeing what other teams are doing that we don't want to do. Now we have a lot of examples of ourselves doing those things on our own tapes."