Patriots look ordinary, vulnerable
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PITTSBURGH – Tom Brady had a keen sense of what you might be thinking as he tried to explain what all went wrong at Heinz Field. It was just a mess of a loss for the Patriots, who suddenly have the look of some basic, ordinary NFL team in trouble rather a perennial contender.
“All of us feel it,” Brady said Sunday night after the 17-10 setback against the Steelers. “It’s not any one thing, and it’s a lot of things collectively. We have always won as a team, and we lose as a team.
“We’re not going to make any excuses. We just have to do a better job.”
New England (9-5), which might have cost itself a first-round bye in the AFC playoffs with the loss, has certainly had its share of similar rough patches and assorted adversities throughout these dynasty decades. Yet typically Bill Belichick’s teams manage to show up in January with a chance to contend for a Super Bowl.
But the latest performance, a week
after a last-minute meltdown in Miami, was so far off the scale of what’s typical for Belichick’s crew, especially at this time of year. Let’s count some ways:
❚ The last-minute magic was missing. And Brady’s three incompletions to the end zone that settled the game marked the second fourth-quarter drive in which New England came up with zero points.
❚ The run defense was horrific. That was Jaylen Samuels, not Le’Veon Bell or even James Conner, who shredded New England for 142 rushing yards. Samuels, a fifth-round rookie, had never rushed for 100 yards, not even in high school. Nor had he ever carried 19 times in a game until Sunday.
❚ Rob Gronkowski was a shell of himself. That’s been a theme all season, but he’s been a card-carrying Steelers’ killer for years. He didn’t catch a pass Sunday until the fourth quarter, but it wasn’t a matter of him merely being smothered by Pittsburgh’s coverage. It appeared that for much of the game the Patriots kept Gronkowski out of patterns and instead relied on him more as a pass protector. In the end: two catches, 21 yards.
❚ The penalties. Nothing blares “sloppy” like 14 penalties for 106 yards.
❚ The drops. At least four of Brady’s passes were breadbasket throws muffed by the receivers.
❚ The misfires. Brady wasn’t as sharp as usual, sometimes affected by the Steelers’ rush and in other cases just plain off. Or a combination of both factors. On the fourth-quarter redzone pick snagged by Joe Haden at the sideline, Brady insists he was trying to throw the football away. And none of the last four throws to the end zone came close to connecting for six points.
This all adds up to a lot of corrections, with the Patriots suffering backto-back December losses for the first time since 2002. Let that sink in for a minute: 2002.
That’s why this is stunning. Usually, Belichick’s teams are so much better in December, fine-tuning for the playoffs, than they are in September. They build as the season progresses, tweaking and adapting along the way. But now the Patriots have a serious look of regression.
“There is only one way to do a better job,” Brady said, predictably, “and that’s to learn from it, correct it and go out there on the practice field and work harder at it.”
The warnings are undoubtedly staring the Patriots in the face. Without sharp execution, they look like an NFL also-ran. Mystique won’t win in crunchtime, even though it might have stung Jacksonville in last year’s AFC title game. And when, or if, they have to go on the road in the playoffs, with a 3-5 road mark in the regular season, the trend will not be in their favor. New England has not played in the wild-card round since 2009 and never made it to the Super Bowl after missing out on a first-round bye.
Yet now is not the time to overreact and declare the Patriots as finished, as tempting as that can be as they are on the verge of their worst regular-season mark since 2009. Yes, as Ben Roethlisberger has described in the past, the Steelers slayed their dragon by beating New England for the first time in seven years. But Belichick, Brady and the Patriots have earned a certain benefit of the doubt, given their presence in the past seven AFC Championship Games.
Sure, the NFL is a what-have-youdone-for-me-lately type of business. Yet that doesn’t apply only to the Patriots, who still have a solid shot of winning their final two home games against the Bills and Jets as they close in on a 10th consecutive AFC East crown, extending their own record.
Shoot, there’s no guarantee that Houston (10-4) will win at Philadelphia next weekend and hang onto the slot for the No. 2 seed, especially with the defending Super Bowl champs poised to put up a fight. No guarantee that the Chiefs, holding the No. 1 seed, will snap that six-game home playoff losing streak. No guarantee that somehow, the AFC title game won’t be in Foxborough, Massachusetts, again … as far-fetched as that prospect seems about now.
Strange things happen every week in the NFL, which is one more reason not to count the Patriots out. But the way they’ve played lately, they can’t be trusted to bank on, either.
One thing for sure: Nobody’s feeling sorry for Belichick, Brady and the Patriots.
Dragons get no sympathy.