Despite the 0-4 pre-season record, despite the consistently uninspired performances on offense and defense, despite the absence of many bright spots beyond the play of rookie inside linebacker Jared Mayo, despite the fretting over Tom Brady’s foot and who’s going to play cornerback, despite the mess training camp has been, nearly everything that has happened to the Patriots this summer is now meaningless. This is a good thing, but it is also not the only thing.

In 10 days a new season, the only season, will open against the kind of team a lot of top colleges would schedule in its opener if they could. Certainly the Chiefs themselves will be inconsequential because the only way they can win that game on Sept. 7 is if the Patriots decide to lose it.

The four exhibition defeats will be little more than glorified scrimmages in the mind, games that carry no weight once a new season dawns. The same is true of the shaky play of the backup quarterbacks, because unless Brady’s foot is broken, Matt Cassel or Kevin O’Connell will not break a sweat all year.

As the normally dour Bill Belichick commented after Thursday’s 19-14 loss in New York, “Once the season starts it’s a whole new ball game. We know that. What counts is how you play in the regular season. That’s what matters.’

True, but one thing remains disturbing about Thursday night’s mauling in the Meadowlands and that was the apparent absence of a sense of pride in the Patriots’ defense after the Giants were first handed the football. New York manhandled them at the line of scrimmage on that opening drive, dashing off runs of 19, 11 and 11 yards in which the starting front seven looked like they’d come equipped with roller blades.

As their previous counterparts had done on their opening drive this summer, the Giants moved easily downfield, marching 80 yards in nine unchallenged plays on a drive that was capped by a touchdown catch and run by Darcy Johnson in which safety James Sanders took an angle so ridiculous he must have failed plane geometry, missing an open-field tackle after which cornerback Fernando Bryant did his best impression of Deion Sanders avoiding making a tackle. Bryant backpedaled for about 10 yards while Johnson pushed him all the way into the end zone as if he were pushing a pile of wood shavings out of the garage.

For three straight games the Patriots had allowed their opponents to march down the field and score on the game’s opening drive. Twice they gave up field goals and once, in Tampa, they allowed a bone-numbing 17-play drive for a touchdown in which they were undressed and soundly lashed. Because of these consistent lapses of interest at the start of games, it seemed reasonable to expect that although the starters would play little against the Giants when they did play at the beginning they would do so in a meaningful fashion…or at least as if they understood that football involves contact.

They would, it seemed logical to assume, refuse to allow another team to thrust the ball down their throats in the game’s opening minutes without a fight if, for no other reason, than to prove to themselves they could be awake when a game started.

Well, logic went out the window and the defense took a dive instead. The Patriots’ first defensive unit (less linebacker Adalius Thomas) were steamrollered by New York’s running game and embarrassed by a short passing attack that allowed Giant receivers to not only catch the ball unimpeded but then run through one lousy excuse for a tackle after another.

On offense the story wasn’t much different. They were slapped around at the line of scrimmage when they tried to run the ball and were shutout in the first half. In other words, they played offense the way they played defense, which is to say they didn’t play with passion or precision, often not even adhering to the basic tenets of blocking and tackling.

Now it is fair to assume little planning went into the approach Thursday night. Not much was tried of an exotic nature and certainly few of the things Belichick will run against the Chiefs were on display, which explains much of the pre-season malaise that has characterized the Patriots play all summer.

As Giants’ backup quarterback David Carr said after his solid performance (which should tell you how uninspired the Patriots’ defense really was), “They were vanilla."

True, but why were they also milquetoast? 

Vanilla does not explain four straight games with shoddy tackling. Vanilla does not excuse an apparent unwillingness to block. Vanilla does not make unimportant an apparent disinterest in putting a hat on a hat or fighting through a block and filling their proper gaps. Those skills have nothing to do with game planning or scheming. They have to do with “want to” not “how to” and they obviously didn’t want to all that much at the start of each of those four pre-season games if they still are who they think they are.

There was little evidence of the pridefulness that has characterized the play of New England’s defense during the seven-year run that has produced three Super Bowl championships and four Super Bowl appearances and that is what’s alarming. Not the scores or the losses. Those are meaningless. What is not was their apparent inability to convince themselves that anything was important this pre-season beyond staying healthy.

Collectively they tackled all summer as if they couldn’t care less if they got the ball carrier on the ground or not and hence didn’t until he was farther along than he should have been. This is worrisome but not fatal because the good news is these kind of things remain correctable in most cases. The bad news is they haven’t corrected them for a month now so maybe in the case of some players, like the badly slowing Bruschi at inside linebacker, it’s that they can’t not that they won’t.

Time will tell on that and it won’t take long because the Chiefs’ bruising running back Larry Johnson will test Bruschi and the interior defense dearly next week, assuming his offensive line can block anyone, which they very well may not.

The same one has to wonder about aging safety John Lynch, who whiffed badly on several tackles, including one near the goal line Thursday night that resulted in a touchdown. Another gaffe came in the deep flat on a play in which rookie linebacker Shawn Crable was jogging after the ball went over his head until he realized Lynch had done a Julio Lugo on his intended target and missed completely.

Crable then took off and assisted in the tackle downfield but not until a half-dozen extra yards had been gained. Wonder where he learned that approach to defense?

Now this all may have been inexperience or unfamiliarity which froze Crable and Lynch with deadly moments of self-doubt (thought before reaction) on some of those plays because they are new around here but what about the more experienced hands? Could they not tackle somebody or at least keep their feet somehow early in the game or, more to the point, early in any of those four games?

Whatever the cause of those problems, things better change and they better change fast. It is one thing to be losing exhibition games because of the uninspired play of backup quarterbacks or a vanilla approach to offense and defense. It’s quite another to give up scoring drives on the first series of the game for four straight weeks and look as bad at the end of that month as you did at the start doing it.

A lot of things don’t count in the summer but having some pride in yourself does. Against the Giants, especially on that opening drive, the Patriots’ defense did not play like it had an ounce of it. Bryant played that touchdown run the way they do it in Detroit, which is where he was a year ago. So did Sanders, whose angle of approach was addle-headed, to be kind.

With all the success they’ve had around here the past seven years one has to be fair about this and assume this was just the summer doldrums and will all disappear by Sept. 7. Certainly they have the perfect team in front of them for that to happen and they‘ve earned the right for folks to think that.

But if a laissez-faire attitude toward the blocking and tackling of their opponents doesn’t disappear soon some of the guys responsible will because they can’t blame those kind of problems on Tom Brady’s foot or a vanilla game plan. They can only blame themselves.

Ron Borges' Patriots and NFL columns can be seen every Monday and Friday on WEEI.com. Ron's can be reached at rborges@weei.com.