The fact that they're second in the NFL in point differential says otherwise.
The Game Goat Thread: vs Seahawks
- Thread starter SeoulSoxFan
- Start date
Yeah, what? This is a top 4 offense in the league if not the outright best. Two of the others in the conversation are quarterbacked by a rookie and Matt Ryan. In what looks like a pretty down year for the league as a whole it's not at all crazy to think they can 2011 it, and that team was a dropped pass away from winning it all.
Its the best offense in the league with everybody healthy. Dion Lewis was one of their best players last year when healthy, and he might be getting back into the mix. The defense isn't even as bad as the 2011 abortion. There's some red flags about the defense, but panic and writing the season off because off the defense is a dramatic overreaction/example of recency bias. Unless Brady dies they should be 11-2 heading into Denver.
The mighty Dallas Cowboys let Big Ben throw for 400+ yards, 3 TDs, and 0 INTs while sacking him exactly once. That's not exactly a championship-level performance on defense. Yes, the Cowboys won the game but they won it based upon their offense. If Brady can put them into the end zone to end the 4th quarter they are going to OT despite the poor defensive showing.
No one is pretending the Patriots even have an above average defense at this time. But, they are well-rounded enough for them to be a top 2 or 3 SB favorite.
A lot of that has to do with a cupcake schedule. They also caught PIT at the perfect time.
The best QB they had faced prior to yesterday was probably Andy Dalton.
For as bad as the defense was, and they were bad, up until that fumble by Edelman, the defense had been doing pretty good limiting the Seahawks to field goals in the red zone. If Edelman doesnt fumble there the Patriots had a very real shot to win that game (not that I am blaming Edelman for the loss).
The frustrating part is they are probably a Chandler Jones away from tipping the scales to a defense that could carry them at times. That trade just looks so, so bad in hindsight. The excuse can't be that they didn't have the talent, they did and let it walk out the door.
edit, didn't let it walk out the door, they pushed it out the door and replaced it with a late 2000s model.
I don't think it would turn them into a defense that could carry them, but a couple of pass rushing plays a game might make a difference and its not like the guys they've replaced Jones with have been better against the run. They got some value for Jones, but that does look like a miscalculation right now.
Your second point is better than the first. As DrewDawg points out, there are more than a few cupcakes on most good teams schedules this season. Dallas and the Patriots, for instance, each play all the AFCN teams in a down year in that division.
The quarterback point, though, is legit. They played Carson Palmer and Andy Dalton before last night. The best QB they have to face the rest of the way is probably Tannehill, now that the Dolphins have started putting it together. Flacco's had a down year, the Jets situation is a mess, Goff likely still will be acclimating and Simien is average. Kaepernick might be hard to handle, but the 49ers are poor defensively
They had a very real shot to win the game anyway.
I'd like to see them be good at something defensively. Run stopping, QB Pressure, turnovers, just something. I hope they can improve one or more of those areas as they head into the playoffs.
Yeah, pretty sure BB wouldn't have traded Jones if he had foreseen that he'd be moving Collins in a midseason addition-by-subtraction move. Even legends make mistakes.
Pretty much anyone in the AFC West/NFC South/NFC East
Big caveat that the NE schedule would look a lot tougher had they faced PIT w/ Big Ben or BUF with Shady McCoy.
Just as worrisome as the poor defensive play overall is the fact that we've now seen two-and-a-half games (the second half vs MIA, the first BUF game, and last night) in which the secondary looked clueless and/or poorly prepared for the offense they were facing. In spite of having Duane Starks flashbacks last night, I can't recall any unit on a Pats team in the BB era looking so consistently ill prepared (as opposed to simply not having enough good players).
This is silly. He said he writes hundred of letters to people...he probably has written so many letters, and not one has every been referenced out loud in the possibly contentious circumstances of a presidential rally during a bitter election campaign.
"Don't ever write a little Bill, someone might read it out loud and then your football team won't be able to win. Bigly!"
He claims he writes all those letters. I stated upthread I thought that was almost certainly false.
He should have known better.
http://www.nfl.com/belichickletters
Dude loves to write letters. Whether he should have told Trump "yo, keep this personal between you and me" is a different question, but he's not lying about writing lots and lots of notes.
I always find it funny when people seem surprised or put out that millionaires are republicans.
That Bill had to spend some time during the week addressing the reaction to his letter does not tell me that he was any less prepared for that game than he would have been. He issued a statement about it and moved on. That Trump is controversial doesn't increase the amount of time he had to spend on it. Not that I think it would have mattered had this happened in an ordinary week, but that it was a bye week strengthens my view that BB had ample time for Seattle notwithstanding that he had to address and answer some questions about his letter.
The ONLY reason why the Trump thing might have mattered is that it might have affected the team, and my sense is that it didn't. My sense is that they respect BB enough as a HC/GM that his politics and who he chooses to be friends with gets not much more than a shrug out of his troops.
But the notion that he was less prepared and dialed into the game because of some media reaction to a letter and resulting need to explain it is, in my view, laughable.
Right. Let's keep the focus where it ought to be: on Brady's INT which never would've happened if he hadn't talked to Trump.
To each their own. I prefer my head coach not to needlessly stir up controversy with ill-advised political statements, but YMMV.
The defense certainly had no fucking idea what it was doing on Sunday night. I haven't seen zone defense like that since Rod Rust was coaching. Whether that's due to lack of preparation or lack of focus or lack of talent will have to be seen.
The defense certainly had no fucking idea what it was doing on Sunday night. I haven't seen zone defense like that since Rod Rust was coaching. Whether that's due to lack of preparation or lack of focus or lack of talent will have to be seen.
Did he ever say if that ball slipped? Because it was severely underthrown, and not in a "Brady can't throw deep" kinda way.
I think it did slip. The ball went straight up in the air. He actually had Mitchell open on that had he been able to get it down here.
Why are you so sure it's false? Based on...how often you write letters? Based on...how you know he's such a fan of Instaface? And yet, somehow, suddenly he picked right now to write his first ever letter to someone?
Seriously WTF? He wrote a letter to a guy. If that's going to undermine his football team's ability to win, I don't see how it's remotely possible that he's been an effective coach for this long. Do you think the team spent time talking about it in the huddle?
edit: obviously it doesn't really matter at this point. It's just a really bizarre thing to get upset at BB for.
Do you think that if Welker had sent a letter to a friend with all the Rex Ryan foot jokes, and then other person had read Wes's private letter out loud, that BB would have benched Wes? I doubt it.
If you or BB don't see how possibly writing a public letter to the cheeto-looking fascist on the eve of an extremely contentious election and then dealing with the entirely-forseeable fallout from that act might take away from preparations for the Seattle game then we're all done here.
fair enough...although I was more invested in The Letter issue than the crowd noise one.
New threads are good!
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/greg-cosells-week-10-review-seattles-strategic-wrinkle-that-gave-new-england-fits-180122166.html
Seattle essentially did to the Patriots what the Patriots do to other teams.
