A costly brawl game
Pats’ ‘next man up’ mantra to be tested
FOXBORO — If yesterday’s Patriots-Dolphins game was a movie, you would have walked out before the popcorn got cold. In fact that’s what many of the alleged crowd of 65,878 at Gillette Stadium chose to do, leaving normally jammed Route 1 as wide open by the end of the day as Miami’s defensive front was when facing (or not facing) New England’s running game for most of the day.
The 35-17 Patriots’ victory was many things but artistic it was not. Neither was it particularly entertaining. What it might have been though is costly.
At this time of year, at least for teams that have a 9-2 record and hold a three-game division lead with five to play as New England does, games like yesterday’s are like an episode of “Survivor.” You just hope to leave with immunity from elimination. You hope to leave without the big miss or, more to the point, the big missing person or too many little ones ending up in the ER.
Bill Belichick has often said the season really doesn’t begin until after Thanksgiving and his mentor, Bill Parcells, always insisted the NFL was not one season but four seasons of four games each. Who you were after the first four weeks often did not resemble who you were after the last four because of the physical toll the game takes.
So the NFL, especially in November and December, is as much a game of “Survivor” as the CBS reality show is but this is one where the carnage is often far more severe. Yesterday was such a game and what its long-term effect will be no one knows.
Before the opening kickoff was struck, the Patriots offense was already without Julian Edelman, Chris Hogan, Marcus Cannon, David Andrews and Martellus Bennett. That’s 40 percent of the starting offensive line and 40 percent of the wide receiving corps expected to be in place this season.
Defensively the news was only slightly better with cornerback Eric Rowe still out and linebacker Dont’a Hightower long gone for the season. By the end of a chippy day with the Dolphins, linebackers Kyle Van Noy and Marquis Flowers were both sidelined and so was the team’s best pass rusher, Trey Flowers. Add to that the return of defensive tackle Malcom Brown after a long absence from his own maladies and you have a roster far different from what you hoped to see when the stretch run to the playoffs began.
Every team has such problems but we don’t care about every team around here. We only care about one, which is why one has to wonder, for example, what the longterm effects might be of the additional losses of special team mavens Matthew Slater, Nate Ebner and Trevor Reilly.
Slater was a pregame scratch again and Ebner and Reilly went down during yesterday’s street fight, the latter suffering a concussion whether the team ever publicly acknowledges it or not. What does that mean going forward? Problems.
Reilly and Ebner play on five of the six special teams. While Belichick is not one to lament injuries, or even acknowledge them unless a bone or two is protruding through the skin, he admitted that these kind of losses create mounting problems.
“When multiple players are injured, and particularly when it’s on one play, then it creates a little bit of a scramble,’’ Belichick said. “An even bigger problem is in the kicking game because you have six units on special teams … so when you lose a player there, like when Nate went down, you lose a guy that’s on five of those six teams and it’s not always the same guy replacing him. So that’s challenging for the coaches and the players. That’s part of football, unfortunately. Sometimes it knocks you out of a certain grouping or a certain unit that you have out there. Then you back it up with something else, whatever your alternative group is . ... That’s the challenge.’’
One can say “next man up’’ only so often because after a time the next man up is a problem not a solution. If you think otherwise, go watch tape of a backup linebacker named Pierre Woods being scorched in critical moments by Peyton Manning in the 2006 AFC Championship Game. Next man up is all well and good but if it becomes too many next men up, you’re going down.
Yesterday’s game was particularly dangerous because Tom Brady was one of those guys going down. And down. And down again.
So much so that his frustration level grew to the point he was jawing with Miami wide receiver Kenny Stills when Stills was on the sidelines. Their back-and-forth may not have been why he threw just an awful interception minutes later but Stills kept pointing to his head, implying he was inside it.
Wherever he was wasn’t the point. Where guys like Cameron Wake (one sack, five hits on Brady unofficially) were was more important because too often it was on top of Brady. When Belichick was asked if he considered removing Brady from harm’s way while holding an 18-point lead with less than four minutes to play in a chippy game in which Miami’s offense had long been doing nothing he got chippy himself, telling the Herald’s Karen Guregian, “On the kneel downs? What difference does it make? It’s easy for you to sit there and say the game’s out of hand. If you watch games in the National Football League, a lot can change in a hurry.’’
Actually the issue wasn’t when he was taking a knee, Einstein, it was when he was getting Ndamukong Suh’s knee in his chest and Wake was twisting him into a pretzel long after the score was going to change appreciably enough to affect the outcome. By then it was more likely Brady’s anatomy might change and not for the better.
It didn’t this time but if one looks at yesterday’s body count it brings you back in a hurry to the fact that the next few weeks are as much about survival as they are anything else. Winning remains paramount but if the cost of victory becomes too high, a week later you are no longer what you were.
“Call it a game or call it a brawl,’’ safety Devin McCourty said of the slugfest. “We have all divisional games and Pitt(sburgh) left. They will all be a fight. We’ll just have to see. The way I see it, football is a 100 percent chance you’ll get hurt. Divisional games are always chippy.’’
That’s what it was yesterday — a 100 percent chance someone was going to get hurt and they did. It was first a game and then a fistfight and the Patriots won them both but one has to wonder at what cost and how much longer they can keep paying it and still be the team they were before the turkey went into the oven and the real season began?