Obviously a terrible loss with tons of blame to go around but I wouldn't look at it as any kind of harbinger for the postseason at all. Look, the NFL hasn't been this wide open in at least a decade. Nearly every top tier team has major flaws and is playing like hot garbage right now on at least one side of the ball. Any team could get hot in January and win it all. Home, road, bye or not, we have no idea who is going to play well next month. If I could find some Vegas action on a 5/6 seed winning the Super Bowl this year, I'd take a flier.
The bottom line for the Pats is they need to find a way to shore up the run defense without leaving the secondary exposed in the passing game. If there was ever a time to pull out some kind of "big nickel" kind of alignment, it would be right now. If they can fix that flaw, they could make a deep run. If they can't, this is a one-and-done team. It will have nothing to do with a post-Miami hangover - Simply an inability to fix their most glaring defensive issue.