FOXBORO – Without an opponent to prepare for, Bill Belichick has always taken advantage of the Patriots’ bye week by using two or three days to reinforce some fundamentals and improve his team.

Things were no different this week, as New England did some self-scouting, taking stock of what has – and hasn’t – worked for the club to this point, nearly midway through the 16-game regular-season schedule.

The Pats are coming off two dominating wins, allowing a total of seven points to the Titans and Buccaneers while scoring 94 themselves. Despite that, no one is satisfied with the overall status of the team to this point; as most successful people and teams do, they are looking to be better.

“We still have a lot of stuff to get better at,” veteran running back Kevin Faulk said. “There’s a lot of little things that as players, at this point in the season, we shouldn’t be doing.”

Things like missing tackles, which New England has its fair share of, or being called for false-start penalties, as happened to the offensive line several times against Tampa Bay.

As Belichick termed it, the Patriots need to “stay sharp,” or as the case may be in certain areas, sharpen up.

During the course of self-scouting, the Pats’ 10th-year head coach explained, there were two things the coaching staff and players were looking at: tendencies and production.

“Your own tendencies – what you’re doing in certain situations by plays, blitzes, returns, by down-and-distance, by field position, by hash mark, by personnel that’s in the game, by the alignment, formation you line up in – all those things,” he said. “You sort of look at what other people are seeing from you and what tendencies you have. I think every good team has tendencies. I think you can look out there at any team, in football, in basketball, in hockey; there are certain things that they do, and if they’re a good team they probably do them well.”

Tendencies aren’t a bad thing, Belichick continued, but they do need to be evaluated to make sure there is balance.

The staff also tries to look at things as though they were an opponent, looking to see if there is a clear indication that the defense blitzes in certain situations, or uses cover-one or cover-five in certain situations. If New England notices a pattern, chances are other teams are as well, and it makes the Patriots predictable.

As for production, the team looks at “where you’re actually producing. What plays – how productive are they? Maybe in certain situations, how productive is the play on first down? How productive is that play on third down? Is it the right side, left side, man coverage, zone coverage? All those different kinds of things,” he said.

Through that evaluation, some things get tossed out while others may be built upon and expanded.

New England of course has technology at its disposal which allows it to catalog and evaluate every play by situation: for example, how they reacted defensively to a third-and-long (six-plus yards) situation, or which call the offense made on second-and-two.

That’s all useful, but there’s no substitute for watching the film, whether on a week-to-week basis or when the Patriots are looking at a bigger picture.

“Actually seeing (plays) is always a little more valuable than doing a statistical look, although that’s always a good starting point and a lot of times that will trigger something,” Belichick said. “A lot of those things we are aware of on a weekly basis; it isn’t like all of a sudden this week we realized cover-two is our worst coverage. That’s not something that just hit us in last week’s game, for example.

“But it does statistically sometimes point out something and then you go to the film and say ‘well yeah, we had a lot of production on these plays, but it’s a little misleading (because) they had some missed tackles. We had some, but it wasn’t because it was a great play.’ And then there are other things that statistically don’t look good, but you look at it and say, ‘We’re on the right track here.’ There’s no substitute for actually seeing the play, seeing the film.”

New England has been improving in different areas from week to week, but with a tough stretch of games coming up, it took advantage of the opportunity to get better as a whole.

smanza@projo.com