The New England Patriots earned a big-time win over the Buffalo Bills in Week 5, but that has only fueled the team’s hunger to keep this success going. And with that, Mike Vrabel made it clear that there are still a lot of things that they can improve upon, especially since it’s still so early in the year.

One of those is penalties, with the Patriots having had eight accepted penalties for 93 yards in the win, while the Bills tallied 11 for 90 yards.

Vrabel has had to toe the line on the officiating, having said in the past that they are not a strong indicator of wins. But at the same time, it’s certainly something that needs to be cleaned up.

“It’s not that we don’t care about penalties,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We want to make great decisions. I also understand that team fouls are ones that happen before the snap that we have to be better on.

“Hunter [Henry] communicating with the official, thinking that and hoping we got that cleaned up. We don’t want to line up offsides, we don’t want to extend drives. Competition fouls, and we ask them to play full tilt to the tackle, but then there’s a line there. We have to play by two things, the whistle – I just don’t understand how a professional athlete could assume that anybody in this league was down, and we’re going to play to the whistle – and we’re going to play to two feet in the white.”

Vrabel continued, “We have to pass rush and not hit the quarterback in the head, can’t hit him in the knees. If another player has two feet in the white, we can’t hit him or give the appearance that we’re hitting him. [Brenden] Schooler ran over there, stood there, the same guy got tackled by Marcus [Jones], and the official saw that. So again, you just have to understand what they’re looking at. But we have to play aggressive. I think there has to be an aggressiveness to the way that we play. But also, that comes into the decision-making and when to make a great decision.”

And with that, Vrabel addressed a penalty that had many shaking their heads when Joshua Farmer was flagged for unnecessary roughness in the fourth quarter.

“It’s hard for me to sit here and fault Josh [Joshua Farmer] from last week. There’s no whistle, and the running back’s acting like he’s going to flip the ball back at a quarterback,” he said, adding a different perspective than fans might have seen. “I certainly would have liked to not have had a penalty called, but I can see it both ways. Just ask that they blow the whistle. That’s an easy way for us to say that the play’s over and our efforts need to stop. But I don’t know how else to coach it.

“I don’t know how else to coach professional players on defense in this league with the type of athletes that you’re going against. It’s hard to bring them down with one guy. They keep running, they bounce in, next thing you know. So again, we’ll keep coaching it. It’s not that it’s not important – it’s important, but it’s also – there’s something behind it. I tell you, every X play run – we ought to have Taylor [Kyles] track this – every X play run in this league, there’s probably a hold. They don’t call, that they don’t miss. They don’t see or they don’t feel like they should call it. That’s kind of what happens. You want to be aggressive, certainly just not reckless.”