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FOXBORO - Another week, another blowout.

The undefeated New England Patriots finished the first half of their schedule in perfection, and prepared for their biggest test of this season - a visit to Indianapolis next Sunday to play the 7-0 Colts - by completely dismantling the Washington Redskins, 52-7, Sunday at Gillette Stadium.

The scary part of the Patriots' success through their first eight games is that the victories come with increasing levels of dominance in each successive outing - for everyone on the team except perhaps for quarterback Tom Brady, whose passer rating slipped some 33 points from the previous week.

In other words, Brady went from "perfect" at 158.3 to "pretty damned good" at 125.5. But who's to quibble?

Brady, for one. "The positives are that the offensive line is playing great, the receivers are getting open, the tight ends are playing their role, the backs are holding onto the football," the league's leading passer said after the big victory, in which he three touchdown passes to set a new personal single-season high at 30. "There are a lot of positives but there are also things we can improve."

Brady also ran in two touchdowns, a personal first. He got eight different receivers involved in the mix (led by Wes Welker's nine catches for 89 yards and Kevin Faulk's seven for 57), and Laurence Maroney contributed a solid 75 yards on 14 carries toward a total of 152 rushing yards that lent balance to the attack.

And the Patriots' defense was the stuff of nightmares that Jason Campbell will endure for some time. The Redskins' young quarterback (21-36, 197 yards, one TD, one interception) was intercepted once (by Asante Samuel) and strip-sacked by Mike Vrabel three times, twice recovered by Ty Warren and once by Rosevelt Colvin for an 11-yard touchdown return that put the Patriots up 38-0 with 5:47 left in the third quarter.

"That was a solid performance by our team today," Patriots' coach Bill Belichick said. "I thought the players really did a good job. We had probably our best week of practice that we've had all year, especially defensively. I thought the guys really went out there and played well."

Redskins' coach Joe Gibbs had no choice but to agree.

"From our standpoint, the Redskins' standpoint, we just couldn't get anything going out there today," the Hall of Fame coach said. "I think that we have to start off by giving the Patriots all the credit, it's a real, real good football team. Looking across there, I don't know of a weakness that they have. I was hoping we could make some plays and get ourselves going but we couldn't."

It didn't help much that Gibbs and his staff had communication outages in their headsets during the game - ones that apparently didn't require a similar shutdown on the Patriots' side - but Gibbs refused to take potshots at the Patriots for that or for the lopsided scores.

"There were issues," Gibbs said of the headset outages. "It's a problem across the league. I don't want to use that as an excuse for what happened to us today. We'll just continue to the let the league know what happened to us today and we'll just have to see how they deal with it."

Some might also suggest that the Patriots' last two touchdowns were unnecessary, especially since it took fourth-down conversions to keep their possessions going. Brady threw a 2-yard TD pass to Welker and backup Matt Cassel ran in a 15-yard score to pad the final score before Campbell threw a 15-yard TD pass to Chris Cooley with three minutes left to break the shutout bid.

"I thought we would play better than we did, certainly," Gibbs said. "In all three phases we were kind of together - we didn't play well, we didn't make plays. Of course, that starts with me." For the eighth time in eight games, the Patriots scored on their opening possession. They took 7:16 off the clock while covering 90 yards in 14 plays, Brady scoring on a 3-yard run with 3:44 left in the opening quarter.

Maroney played a big role in the opening drive, carrying six times for 36 yards, and Faulk contributed three catches, the second of which sent him past Gino Cappelletti (292 catches) for sixth place on the team's all-time reception list. Welker also picked up 19 yards on a catch to get into the Redskins' red zone.

They made it 14-0 on a play that Gibbs should be absolutely ashamed of himself for not having figured it out - goal-line situation at the Washington 2, Vrabel in the game as an extra tight end, going in motion from left to right and then slipping into the end zone without even as much as a cross-eyed look from anyone to catch the easy TD pass from Brady with 8:08 left in the first half.

The 10th catch (and 10th touchdown catch) of the linebacker's career capped a nine-play, 67-yard drive, with the setup being a 25-yard toss from Brady to Maroney, escaping the backfield and slipping a tackle to get to the Washington 5.

The lead went to 17-0 on a 36-yard field goal by Stephen Gostkowski with 5:45 left, four plays after Vrabel sacked Campbell and stripped him of the football and Warren recovered at the Washington 21. They might have gotten more points out of the possession, but Randy Moss (three catches, 47 yards, one TD) suffered a rare drop of a sideline pass on third down.

He made up for that with 17 seconds left in the half, when he caught a fake-spike pass from Brady - a play the Patriots nearly pulled off a week earlier in Miami - from 6 yards out for a 24-0 lead.

The drive, made possible by a second strip-and-recovery combination by Vrabel and Watson with Campbell losing the ball at the New England 27, covered the 73 yards in eight plays and 1:32. It featured a 19-yard pass to Kyle Brady and two throws to Welker for 15 and 10 yards before Moss caught his first pass of the game, his 11th touchdown reception of the year.

Tom Brady also reached a milestone by scoring his second rushing touchdown of the game on a 2-yard keeper with 7:14 left in the third quarter. The 82-yard drive included passes of 28 yards to Donté Stallworth, 12 to Maroney and a pair of passes to Jabar Gaffney inside the 10 to set up the scoring play. Maroney also had a nifty 9-yard run in which he escaped a horse-collar tackle attempt by Washington's Philip Daniels and reversed his field to pick up the first down at the 13.

On the ensuing possession, Campbell coughed up the ball again - a 10-yard sack by Vrabel coming in unblocked from right end, a loose ball, and Colvin picking it up and running it in from 11 yards out for a 38-0 lead with 5:47 left in the quarter.

The game was such a blowout, it almost went without notice that defensive end Richard Seymour made his first appearances on the field after being taken off the PUP list - more cameo appearances than anything else, as he didn't make the stat sheet.

"I don't know about easing anybody back," Belichick said of Seymour's limited snaps. "He's out there competing against an experienced offensive line. A lot of guys played today. Hopefully they all learned something and got a little bit better.

"We'll need to be at our best next week (at Indianapolis)," he added, "so anything we can do to get better this week, we'll take it."

MARK FARINELLA may be reached at 508-236-0315 or via e-mail at mfarinel@thesunchronicle.com