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Death of an Illusion -- I Wish

 Here's a question for NFL fans. Is it marginally more painful to lose in the playoffs by being thrashed by a superior opponent in top form, as happened to the Patriots last Saturday night, or to lose by seeing one's own superior team self-destruct through endless examples of avoidable stupidity, culminating in the worst of them all, as happened to the Cowboys yesterday?

That's a rhetorical question. Of course they both suck. I suppose it's a little better to know your heroes just had no shot in their loss than to see them throw a game away, but that's cold comfort to Patriots fans, especially if they reflect on the real root cause of that 47-17 blowout. Their team has the harder road to improvement.

The Cowboys need to be a smarter, more disciplined team. That's a coaching deficiency, which while not an easy problem to solve, is at least easy to try and solve. Fire Mike McCarthy. There are always plenty of NFL head coaches on the market, and some (not most, God knows) of them are actually good at it. Dallas doesn't need more talent, it has plenty. Even its punter was second team All-Pro.

The Patriots main problem, made quite evident by their last month of the season and blindly evident even to those ex-Pats players who comprise such a large part of the media-industrial complex that covers New England last Saturday night, is just as simple to describe. It's the most basic problem in any team sport, yet also by far the most difficult to address, yet alone solve. The Pats don't have enough good players to be a championship contender. They especially lack really good players, a/k/a stars.

The Associate Press released its All-Pro team last week. The Patriots were one of the two out of 14 playoff teams (the Cardinals were the other) who did not have a single player named as a first team All-Pro, that is, a player judged by the voters to have been one of the 26 best players in the league. Cornerback J.C. Jackson and special teamer Matthew Slater did make second team.

Second team All-Pro is not chopped liver. Guys like Bobby Wagner, Ja'Marr Chase and oh, yeah, Tom Brady were on that team. Cornerbacks and special teamers are important parts of any team. They are not, however, the part of the team that scores points.

Mac Jones was the most valuable Patriot on offense this season. He was about the 15th or 16th best quarterback in the league, which is a phenomenal accomplishment for a rookie starter. And Jones led an offense which was, to be kind, pedestrian in both planning and personnel. Safety first was the watchword. There was a psychic sign in the huddle reading "it's been x days since our last big mistake."

And given the Pats' skill personnel, what other plan could Bill Belichick have had? Hard-nosed running backs, a couple of journeymen tight ends and a veteran wideout corps of OK third receivers, led by a rookie QB? New England's Plan A for victory, error-avoidance with the ball and strong defense without it, was also its Plans A through Z. Players dictate "schemes."

The plan didn't go well at the start, then blossomed in late fall. Opponents like the Jets, Panthers and Falcons were good fertilizer for success. The most spoiled fan base in professional sports this side of Real Madrid saw a fortuitous winning streak as proof of a return to glory. A game won by the weather in Buffalo was proof that Belichick's genius would triumph over all.

Error avoidance and defense is maybe the oldest football strategy of 'em all. It can and does work, as the Pats showed. It also has two large flaws. One is that error-avoidance in any aspect of football is HARD. The game is chaos, and shit happens. The ball, as they say, takes funny bounces. Play conservatively either by necessity or design, and your mistakes, a blown coverage, a holding penalty on third down, etc., assume greater weight in the outcome.

As we saw last night, the Chiefs can commit about 15 game-losing plays in a quarter and still win going away against a lesser foe. They have players who can erase mistakes and then some. The Pats have Kendrick Bourne, a solid pro who's unlikely to make any All-Pro team ever.

Which leads us inevitably to problem number two with the error-avoidance strategy. It cannot withstand one special kind of adversity, a quick early lead by the opposition. Trail by 14-0 and the win with running and defense plan goes into the shredder. Team Error Avoidance is 85 percent of the way to defeat.

14-0 is exactly the score by which the Pats trailed early in their losses tot he Colts, Dolphins and of course against the Bills in the wild card game. It's important to remember football players are not fools about their profession. That's why I believe the total collapse of New England's defense in Buffalo was a matter of small-group social psychology. Having seen what happened the last two times they went down 14-0, I believe defenders shared the unspoken thought "uh-oh, we're fucked now." Once a football team has thought, it is. Only the greatest players can perform well when they think it won't do any good and the scoreboard tells them they're right.

Returning to the physical world, the Pats could also use another edge rusher, two or three linebackers with some kind of foot speed, and several more new defensive backs. The New England defense is good enough to dominate inferior teams. Against those better than the median, well... The Pats were a perfect 7-0 against teams with losing records in 2021. Against teams with winning ones, they were 3-8.

Having spent A-list money to acquire B-list free agents last year means that route to improvement may be closed. It will take a very good draft to improve the Pats significantly in 2022. It'll probably take at least one more to get them past wild-card loserdom.

It's my belief Belichick is the one person in New England who saw his team in full, even when it was winning seven in a row. I think that coach decided quite early on that Jones was the only unalloyed positive that would come from that season and that he would protect his rookie quarterback from mental and physical harm at all costs.  That caution may have cost the Pats a game or two. It was still the smart move. New England's future was not now. We still can't put a date on it, if it's defined, as fans here will always do, by returning to the Super Bowl.

All we can say for sure about the Pats' future is that barring injury, it will have Mac Jones at quarterback. Which is one hell of a lot more than anyone knew about their future at this time last year.

I won't argue with anyone who says New England's 2021 wasn't a success. But I won't accept anyone calling it a failure, either.  It was something in between, the first stages of a journey liable to be a longer trek than expected. One hopes it'll be a little quieter in these parts if the Pats win two or three in a row next season.

posted by Michael Gee @ 2:25 PM