4 November, 2019
Football Sundays are looked forward to in my house
like seventeen mini-Christmases, the excitement building all week, football
pools filled out like a wish list and a menu produced that would shame any
sports pub...
At the top of the wish list is always a shiny New
England Patriots' victory, which we receive often enough that perhaps we take
it for granted - but there is always a bad Christmas or two when, like in the
movie Scrooged, a young boy is
expecting a choo-choo train but gets instead a five-pound package of veal.
The parents justify the gift by pointing out that
the veal is far more expensive than the train, but it still sucks, and in the
end it winds up being consumed in disappointment and eventually flushed down
the toilet.
The Patriots entered their Sunday night contest
with the Baltimore Ravens on an eight-game choo-choo ride, with a defense that
it was assumed could carry them to a win over any team - but that same defense
was ground into hamburger by the best offense in football before a national
television audience and force-fed to the Patriots' fan base...
...the 37-20 loss a reversal of fortune that
tasted like we scooped it out of the aforementioned toilet, threw it on a bun
and called it a shit burger.
But as poorly as the defense played in spotting
the Ravens' offense a 17-point lead in the first quarter, the Patriots' offense
found its groove in the second quarter, trimming that deficit to just
four-points by halftime with the knowledge of getting the ball first in the
second half dancing in their head like so many sugar plums.
For that brief moment it appeared that New
England's offense had taken full control of the contest, driving the field at
will and mauling the Ravens defenders into submission, poised to grasp the lead
from Baltimore - but the normally reliable Julian Edelman coughed up the ball
on the Ravens' thirty-yard line, the ball scooped up and returned for a score
the other way.
Down eleven points instead of being up by three,
quarterback Tom Brady and his offensive unit responded like champions and cut
the lead to four again, the exhausted Ravens' defense looking incapable of
stopping the Patriots' freight train - but then a series of unlikely errors
killed all the momentum gained by the defending champions, allowing Baltimore
to regain that initial seventeen-point advantage and sending the Patriots home
with a big bag of cold, half-eaten leftovers.
The turning point was obviously the 14-point swing
precipitated by Edelman's fumble, but the real culprit, as it has been all
season long, was the Patriots' offense's inability to finish drives in the red
zone, settling for short field goals and leaving points on the field.
Even so, it is fair to state that the Patriots'
appeared to have taken and survived Baltimore's best shot and were poised to
take over the lead and stomp the game Ravens into the turf at M&T Bank
Stadium with their relentless chain moving style, but the offense's failure to
find paydirt early in the contest proved to be too much to overcome.
Look, we all knew that there would come a point in
the 2019 season that the offense would have to carry the defense, as the level
of dominance displayed by that group of stoppers over the first eight games of
the season was realistically unsustainable for a full 16-game schedule, and
that there would eventually be an opponent that would figure them out...
...the concern then being that the Patriots'
offense's struggles to find the end zone would end up costing them, and that
all came to fruition on Sunday night.
Forget the stats. The Patriots'
"Historic" defense gave up four touchdowns, that one-game total
matching what they had surrendered in their first eight games combined, blowing
them out of the conversation for the best defense in the history of
professional football - but even the best defenses will eventually lay an egg.
The real test will come in two weeks when New England travels to Philadelphia
to take on the Eagles.
How they respond to this performance will tell us
what this defense is truly made of. The offense, despite their season-long red
zone struggles, appears to be rounding into the entity that we've been
conditioned to seeing in years past, but the defense had raised our
expectations into something we've never witnessed before - and now that we've
seen them at their worst, perhaps the unrealistic expectation we had for this
unit will be tempered somewhat.
In reality, the Patriots' defense lies somewhere
between what we witnessed through the first eight games and the shit-show that
we saw last night -and perhaps all of us needed to suffer a performance like
New England laid out on Sunday night, and that includes the Patriots
themselves.
After all, we've seen this before, New England
being blown out on national television, causing all of the so-called experts to
back the meat wagon up to the door at One Patriots Place, most recently a few
years back when the Kansas City Chiefs routed them and caused head ball coach
Bill Belichick to be even more contrite in his post-game presser than usual,
claiming that his team was "On to Cincinnati" and laughing off
questions regarding Brady's future.
Well, now his team is on to Philadelphia with
questions abounding in regard to his defense, with the egg nog-and-cookies
crowd in a panic and predicting doom - but the whiskey drinkers know that if a
few bad plays against Baltimore had gone the other way, they would be looking
at a still-undefeated Patriots' team that had shown the mettle of a champion in
a tight game against a quality opponent.
Unfortunately, the Patriots are entering their bye
week, giving those cookie eaters in the media two weeks to spew their negative
bile to the public, claiming that they told us that this performance is what
the Patriots actually are - but if history holds true, Belichick, Brady and the
Boogeyman defense will rebound and hammer the Eagles, setting off a streak that
will eventually find them in the AFC Championship game for the ninth
consecutive year...
...and if they happen to face this same Ravens'
team on the way to another trip to the Super Bowl, the smart money will be on
the Patriots to come up with an answer to what plagued them last night.
Because we have seen this before, and not only
survived, but flourished.
So despite the bad taste left in our mouths, we
can be assured that Belichick has flushed this performance down the toilet and
is starting the digestion process all over again - preparing his now-humbled
defense to feed on the Eagles like they were so many holiday turkeys.
That said, it figures to be a tough week in the
five weird little states that comprise the New England region; the fans,
already upset by the loss being egged on by the local media with their
doomsayer attitudes, useless opinion and ridiculous poll questions, ready to
jump off the bandwagon...
...but not in Foxborough, where the players most
likely already took accountability for their gaffes before they arrived at the
terminal after what had to be a somber, reflective flight home, and will emerge
from their two-week break with their hair on fire and with some serious motivation
to lay on not only the Eagles, but also the Cowboys, Texans and Chiefs after
them.
Hopefully, Belichick won't have to mutter his dour
“On to Cincinnati” tripe after that list of formidable foes – but if history
has taught us anything, it is that the Patriots always play with a chip on
their shoulder, and now that the chip has grown to the size of the proverbial
elephant-in-the-room, it would surprise no one if they returned to their
dominant ways and ran the table.
Because, if nothing else, this loss has given them
a pretty clear understanding of who they are and what they need to work on
going forward.
Sometimes it takes failing to know how to win –
and if that's the case, perhaps all this incarnation of the New England
Patriots need in one hiccup to get back on track, because despite the loss, the
Patriots know that they had a realistic chance to win, and it was their own
mental errors that prevented that from happening.
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