FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — Tom Brady is practicing with the New England Patriots after being limited in Thursday’s session by an injury to his non-throwing shoulder.

Two days after sitting out practice, Brady stretched with his teammates during the brief period open to reporters Friday.

Asked what Brady was able to do Thursday, coach Bill Belichick said Friday: “Play quarterback, the usual thing.” When asked if Wednesday was a planned day off for Brady, Belichick said he thought that had been covered.

The Patriots have said Wednesday’s absence was not injury-related.

When asked whether Brady would be able to play Sunday against the Buffalo Bills, Belichick said that, too, has been covered.

Comcast SportsNet has reported that Brady had X-rays to check for a separated left shoulder and was told he was “all set.”

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

By: SportsDirect

Patriots, Dolphins still have plenty to play for

By HOWARD ULMAN

AP Sports Writer

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) The New England Patriots are in the playoffs for the ninth time in 11 years. The Miami Dolphins missed them for the ninth time in 10.

Both, though, have a lot at stake on Saturday with the Patriots going for a first-round bye and many Dolphins playing for jobs next season.

And both have the same approach to moving toward those goals. Forget about them.

“Right now, all we’re worried about is Miami,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick told reporters. “All the rest of it is just something for you guys to write about.”

Todd Bowles, a head coach for just one NFL game compared with Belichick’s 291, isn’t focused on what a victory would mean for his future in that position.

“I don’t have any expectations, really,” he said. “I’m just trying to get the guys to play hard and play better and play fast and try to come out with wins. I don’t control those decisions.”

The Patriots (11-3) clinched their third straight AFC East title last Sunday with a 41-23 win at the Denver Broncos. There are several ways for them to secure a bye this week, the easiest being a victory combined with a loss or tie by the Houston Texans. They even can clinch the top seed in the AFC and home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs if they win and Houston, Pittsburgh and Baltimore all lose or tie.

“I don’t think we think about any of those things other than Miami,” quarterback Tom Brady said. “We prepare hard, focus on what we can focus on, control what we can control, go out there and play with great effort, good execution and we’ll be in good position.”

The Dolphins (5-9) will focus on stopping Brady. They couldn’t do it in their season-opening 38-24 loss in Miami in which Brady threw for a franchise record 517 yards. Bowles, who led the Dolphins to a 30-23 win over the Buffalo Bills last Sunday after replacing the fired Tony Sparano, was the secondary coach then.

“It was the toughest game for me as a coach,” Bowles said. “You don’t see those kind of numbers every day. Nothing worked. .man (to man), zone, pressure, prevent. He completed everything. You write it off as a bad loss.”

But he remained confident and the secondary has improved considerably since then.

“I just think it was a bad game,” he said. “You just write it off and move on next week.”

The Patriots also have a dangerous offensive threat to handle. Reggie Bush rushed for a career-high 203 yards against Buffalo last Sunday, the same day New England allowed 167 yards rushing in the first quarter alone.

In their last two games, the Patriots have been burned for a total of 422 yards on the ground.

“He’s a special guy,” New England linebacker Rob Ninkovich said of Bush. “A guy like Reggie can do a lot of different things. … So you’ve just got to make sure you don’t let him do those things.”

Bush already has shown he can thrive as an every-down back, something he didn’t do in his other five NFL seasons, all with the New Orleans Saints.

So what motivates him with his team out of the playoff race?

“It’s the New England Patriots,” he said. “Anytime you’re playing a divisional opponent it’s always big and we want to finish the season strong. At the same time, we know that we’re still being evaluated. No matter what the record says, we’re all still being evaluated on a daily basis, on a weekly basis.”

Bush’s job for next season is secure.

Matt Moore is still trying to enhance his resume as the starting quarterback after Chad Henne suffered a season-ending shoulder injury in the fourth game.

The Dolphins rebounded after losing their first seven games with a 5-2 record, but Moore has completed fewer than 60 percent of his passes in each of the last four games.

Still, Bush said, “he’s been the backbone of this team. I honestly believe that. Without him, we wouldn’t (have) been able to put together the stream of wins that we have. …I think you see when we give him time to throw the ball he can be dangerous, he can be effective.”

He very well could be against the Patriots. Starting with the third week of the season, their defense has been ranked worst in the league in both total yards and yards passing allowed. And now they must go on without defensive end Andre Carter, the team leader with 10 sacks who suffered a season-ending injury to his left quadriceps against the Broncos.

“He works incredibly hard and he’s been having a great season,” cornerback Devin McCourty said. “To lose a guy like that, we just have to come together as a group.”

If they succeed, they could lock up a playoff bye with one regular-season game left. But if the Dolphins play spoilers?

“We’re not trying to spoil anything,” Bowles said. “We’re just trying to get better as a team and try to close out the season on a winning note. So we’re just going to worry about us now.”

Updated December 22, 2011

FOXBORO, Mass. – The wins keep coming for the New England Patriots. Yet each one seems to spark doubts about whether they’re as good as their 11-3 record suggests.

There is concern, from former Patriots Tedy Bruschi and Rodney Harrison to some of their current players to nervous fans who have watched opponents shred their defense.

How can a team that’s on track to allow the second-most yards in NFL history have a six-game winning streak and the best record in the AFC? Is it superior coaching, a star quarterback, or just a remarkable run of good fortune?

“Maybe one or two games we can say, ‘Man, that was a pretty good game,’” wide receiver Deion Branch said. “The rest of them you can just pinpoint a lot of mistakes. But we were lucky enough to come out with a victory.”

Last Sunday, the Patriots beat the Denver Broncos 41-23 but allowed 252 yards rushing, 167 in the first quarter alone. One week earlier, they beat the Washington Redskins, 34-27, a victory secured only by Jerod Mayo’s interception at the Patriots 5-yard line with 20 seconds left.

And the week before that, they watched a 31-3 lead shrink in the last 11 minutes before they held on to beat the then-winless Indianapolis Colts 31-24.

The Patriots figure to win their remaining regular-season games against the Miami Dolphins and Buffalo Bills, both currently 5-9. If they do, they’ll have home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs.

But then what? The Patriots lost their opening playoff game in each of the last two years, games in which their best antidote to poor defense, Tom Brady, struggled.

“This Patriot team is a proven regular-season team, but they have a lot to prove in the playoffs, where they have failed miserably the last two years,” Bruschi, a linebacker on the Patriots’ three Super Bowl championship teams, said Monday during an online chat on ESPNBoston.com. “All teams that make the playoffs should be feared by the Patriots, because what I fear the most for the Patriots is them playing the way they’ve played the last two years in the post-season. So it’s not about who they play, it’s about them showing up.”

Right now, it’s about ignoring the critics and just working to get better.

“I don’t really care what everyone else says,” linebacker Rob Ninkovich said. “I’m just trying to focus on each week and playing good football. We have a good record, yes, but we have to continue to play hard until the season (ends) and when the playoffs start we need to continue to improve. So I really don’t listen to anything out there, just shut it all out.”

To be fair, the starting defense has been battered by injuries. Safety Patrick Chung and linebacker Brandon Spikes missed the last six games. Cornerback Devin McCourty sat out two. Safety James Ihedigbo has missed parts of several games. And now Andre Carter, New England’s best pass rusher with a team-high 10 sacks, is out for the season after hurting his left quadriceps against the Broncos.

While they’ve allowed the most yards in the NFL, only 13 teams have given up fewer points. They’ve let teams score from inside the 20-yard line just 80 per cent of the time, seventh in the league. They lead the AFC with a plus-12 turnover differential. And of their three losses, one came on a last-play field goal, another on a touchdown with 15 seconds left and a third by eight points.

“Our team has played well enough to win 11 games, so that’s good,” coach Bill Belichick said. “We still feel like our best football is in front of us and we keep working hard to try to perform at that level.”

But so far the Patriots have allowed 76 plays of at least 20 yards, more than five per game and 20 more than the single-season franchise high. Overall, they’ve given up an average of 414.4 yards. At that rate, they’d finish with 6,630 total yards, second in NFL history to the Baltimore Colts, who gave up 6,793 yards in 1981 when they went 2-14.

Because of injury or inconsistency, the Patriots have used 16 players in the secondary, including wide receivers Matthew Slater and Julian Edelman. On Wednesday they added a new one, signing seven-year veteran safety Vincent Fuller, who already had been cut this season by Tennessee and Detroit.

“They’ve had a lot of injuries, but (Belichick’s) moved guys around and they’re filling in and getting the job done,” said Redskins receiver Jabar Gaffney, a member of the Patriots team that went 18-0 in the 2007 season before losing the Super Bowl to the New York Giants. “It may not look as pretty, but they still find a way to win.”

It looked downright ugly to Harrison, a hard-hitting safety on the Patriots’ last two championship teams in the 2003 and 2004 seasons.

“They should be concerned because that secondary is probably the worst secondary I’ve seen in the last decade,” Harrison, an analyst on NBC’s “Football Night in America,” said after the Redskins completed passes of 51 and 49 yards against it two weeks ago. “It’s been proven the last two years in the playoffs. If Brady’s off just a little bit, they’re vulnerable to lose.”

But the Patriots try to block out the doubters. No one has to tell them what their weaknesses are.

“You listen to other people if you want to, but (we) know what’s going on inside,” said running back Kevin Faulk, a Patriot since 1999. “There’s always room for improvement and if you are to reach what you want to reach, you always want to improve your team, no matter what it is, in every aspect of it.”

___

AP Sports Writer Joseph White in Washington, D.C., and freelancer Matthew Carroll in Foxborough contributed to this story.

BOSTON (CBS) – The CBS Boston sports team makes their predictions for the New England Patriots big matchup in Denver against Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos.

Walt Perkins, WBZ NewsRadio 1030

It is crunch time in the NFL, that time of year when the better teams find a way to win.

The Patriots have flourished in December. They have traditionally found a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Kind of like what the Denver Broncos are experiencing this year with quarterback Tim Tebow. The much-maligned southpaw has led his team to six straight wins; most in dramatic fashion (three games were settled in overtime).

Read: Pats-Broncos Preview

The Patriots have a QB who knows a thing or 12 (get it?) about fourth quarter comebacks. Tom Brady has engineered a few while at the helm of the good ship Patriots.

However, both players will be the first to tell you that they can’t – and don’t – get the job done without the help of their teammates. That means all of their teammates who toil on both sides of the ball.

This season has been a little different for Brady and the offense. The defense has struggled. It has given up more plays in excess of 20 yards than any other team in the NFL.

The Patriots have succeeded this season because the offense has been able to exploit virtually every defense it faces.  It will need to do that in Denver, as well.  The best way to keep Tebow from engineering any last-minute heroics is to make the margin so large he doesn’t have a prayer, so to speak.

The Broncos have a solid defense but not solid enough to contain Brady and his offense. In the end, it will be the Patriots quarterback taking a knee and it won’t be a genuflection reflection. It will be to watch the final seconds tick off the scoreboard for their 11^th win of the season.

Patriots 41, Broncos 24

Steve Burton, WBZ-TV Sports

The Patriots head to Denver, which is never a fun place for Tom Brady. In fact, he is just 1-5 career against the Broncos.

The Pats have to play all 60-minutes on Sunday or Tim Tebow will make them pay. The kid just gets it done in the fourth quarter. The offense needs to get ahead early and take any “Tebow Magic” out of the equation.

With Deion Branch out, I hope Chad Ochocinco can factor into the Patriots offense. There is no doubt Rob Gronkowski will have a big game, but it would be nice to see Ocho finally get involved. While the Broncos defense has played well, Brady should exorcise his Mile High demons and put up Brady-like numbers.

Stats: Pats-Broncos Head to Head

The Pats defense will have a tough test containing Tebow, and need to make him throw. As bad as the New England secondary has been, Tebow has been just as bad throwing the ball. The guys on the line will have to make sure they contain him, and when he gets to them make sure he goes down. Don’t be surprised if the Pats have someone spying on Tebow throughout the afternoon.

This game should be  a fun one to watch, just as long as it isn’t close in the end. It’s been great watching these Denver comebacks from afar, but no one wants to see another one this weekend.

Dan Roche, WBZ-TV Sports

I would love to see this game live up to the non-stop hype it received this week,

Part of me thinks that the Patriots will win fairly comfortably because Denver hasn’t faced many good teams during this Tebow-led 7-1 run. The best team they faced was a Jets team that was reeling and coming off a Sunday night game and had to pay on a Thursday night.

Read: Dan Roche’s December Thoughts

With that said, Tim Tebow and the Broncos are a dangerous team. They believe in him. He makes plays when he has to and others around him respond. Granted, Chicago running back Marian Barber gave Denver a chance by running out-of-bounds when Denver couldn’t stop the clock last week. But, give credit to Denver. The team (yes, team) led by Tebow took advantage and pulled out a win.

The one factor here is the Patriots have their own weapon/leader/competitor in Tom Brady. Brady can win this game…maybe more so thanTebow. He has to play well.

Can the Pats defense stop Tebow? Yes. For 60 minutes? Probably not. I see the Pats hanging on…..barely.

Pats 27-24 

Levan Reid, WBZ-TV Sports

Okay, I know the hype around Tim Tebow and this game. First and foremost, Tebow has done a great job of helping the Broncos turn their fortunes around. He was a winner in college and he is showing that he can be a winner in the pros.