Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo said earlier in the season that he wanted his team to be a tough group to play against during the final stretch of the campaign.

Even though the playoffs aren’t a realistic goal for the Patriots, they can still lay the foundation for future success by finishing this season strong.

But to accomplish that, their performance in all three phases must improve tremendously from what we witnessed last Sunday.

If signs of progress aren’t shown, Curran says, all levels of the organization deserve scrutiny.

“It’s only been 11 months since the Patriots said goodbye to the greatest coach of all time, Bill Belichick,” Curran said. “But in that 11 months, what they’ve been doing is basically taking a beat. They wanted to see how things looked without Bill. They wanted to keep one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and they would look toward the future. What are they seeing in the future? They’re seeing a team that’s gonna need a lot of work.

“This is a Patriots team that has to figure out, as Jerod Mayo has said, who’s going to stay and what can maintain.

And really everybody has to be on notice as a result of that, whether it’s the players, whether it’s the personnel people, whether it’s the coaches, whether it’s Mayo himself.

“The Patriots are 3-9, and they are not looking like a team that nobody wants to play, which is what Mayo has said. He wanted his team to be smart, tough and disciplined. They’re none out of three, and that’s not good.”

The Patriots have a very winnable game Sunday when they host the Indianapolis Colts in a Week 13 matchup at Gillette Stadium.

They have a Week 14 bye and then finish out the regular season with the second-toughest remaining schedule in football, including matchups versus the Buffalo Bills (twice), Arizona Cardinals and Los Angeles Chargers.

The Patriots could still be a team that nobody is overly excited to play against in December, but they have plenty to work on this week and during the bye.

These final five games don’t matter in the playoff race, but they matter to the future of the team and figuring out what the organization has going forward.