Brady a step ahead
Quick hand of Pats QB frustrates Buffalo ‘D’
ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. — If you’re trying to beat Tom Brady with defense you best remember to do two things: Keep control of the ball and keep control of yourself. Yesterday, the Buffalo Bills did neither.
In a game fraught with emotion, the Bills lost their composure so many times they ended up with nearly as many penalty yards (140) as rushing yards (160). Worse, they turned the ball over three times and ended up allowing one of the league’s most potent offenses to begin its drives, on average, at its own 37yard line. Predictably, they paid a heavy price for their largesse.
The Bills’ 40-32 defeat at Ralph Wilson Stadium was only made that close by the obtuseness of Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels, who insisted on throwing with a 24-point lead and only a quarter to play instead of milking the clock. That nearly blew up in his face but in the end it didn’t because the Bills worked overtime early in the game to dig themselves a hole from which they could never emerge.
Rex Ryan’s vaunted defense gave up the most passing yards in Bills history and the second most ever by Brady (466), shattering a record for defensive ineptitude that lasted for 54 years. George Blanda once threw on the Bills for 461 yards but that was in 1961, the early days of the pass-happy AFL. That was also a time when Buffalo’s entire defense was earning less than defensive end Mario Williams earned yesterday for being scalded by Brady again.
“Any quarterback who’s decent and gets that many opportunities is going to hurt you,” Williams said as he stood at his locker. “If a guy wants to dink and dunk down the field and then we give them a football field and a half on top of what he’s doing to extend the play, extend the drive (with penalties and turnovers), why would you run it? We got to be smarter than that.
“You can’t get frustrated. That’s not going to help us to throw a temper tantrum on the field. Brady was able to know where to go with the ball and kept going with it.”
The Bills were many things yesterday but smart was not one of them. Brady, on the other hand, was Einstein in shoulder pads. He negated Buffalo’s pass rush with quick throws and perfectly read moments of confusion on the Bills’ part.
“They caught us a couple times changing their personnel and we’re trying to change at the same time,” admitted linebacker Nigel Bradham. “The difference was they knew the play coming on the field and we had to try to tell (late arrivals) the play when they were coming on the field trying to sub. They ended up getting us a couple times for that reason. It was miscommunication.
“We knew Brady was going to get the ball out quick. Every time we blitzed, right then he would just throw it.”
Ryan seldom blitzed in the first half but opened things up some in the second. That added pressure eventually paid off with a fourthquarter strip sack of Brady, which set up one touchdown, and stopped him on an ill-advised fourth-down throw, which set up another Buffalo touchdown in a feverish final quarter in which the Bills outscored the Pats 19-3. But by then the damage had been done and it was considerable.
The Pats conceded from the start they could not run on Buffalo, not only keeping LeGarrette Blount on the bench most of the day but rushing the ball only 12 times for 60 yards (discounting Brady’s three scrambles for minus-4 yards). They also knew asking their young offensive line, with at times three rookies in the interior, to pass block long enough to take deep shots downfield was similarly unwise.
So they did as Williams suggested. They dinked and dunked, Brady repeatedly finding the best matchup to attack and getting the ball to him quickly. That most often meant Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman, which was hardly a news bulletin.
The Bills knew that was coming yet Brady knew there was little they could do to stop it if he got the ball out fast enough and to the right spots, which he did. For most of the day, in fact, he got it out as if it was scalding his hands, even though in the end it was the Bills’ hands — and heads — that were burned.
“There’s a difference between coming out ready to go, fired up and ready to play and coming out and being totally without poise, without focus and (doing) a lot of stupid, idiotic stuff,” Bills defensive tackle Kyle Williams said. “That plays right in their hands. If you have no poise, no focus, you get caught up in all the BS. That’s what you do. We did that, especially in the first half.
“The way the game unfolded in the first half is literally the blueprint for how they beat you. Your communication is poor. Your poise is bad and we let it get away from us. There are a lot of things they do with shifts and breaking formations . . . for Tom to see what you’re doing. He’s been doing that for a long time and we knew that coming in. He did a great job. We didn’t.”
No one is better suited to capitalize on chaos than Brady, whose calmness under center (or from the shotgun) is Zen-like. So it was yesterday.
Brady understood time was of the essence. You cannot give the Williamses, Jerry Hughes and Marcell Dareus time to reach you, because they will. You also have to recognize when Ryan is dialing up pressure, as he did in the second half, and react to it quickly but not recklessly.
Calmly, he did what he’s done to the Bills for 15 years. He sliced them to shreds when they gave him short fields (Pats 38, Buffalo 13, Buffalo 30, Buffalo 43, Pats 45), converting them into 24 points and a margin Buffalo could never overcome.
“The game’s not won on the first series, like you saw today,” Brady said of the team’s opening drive struggles. “There will be a lot of different ways to win.”
There are just as many ways to lose, as the Bills proved again yesterday.