I think you're on the wrong track here. Brady isn't to blame for this loss. Is Brady allowed to make a mistake, lest he be the goat (not the GOAT) if they lose? Because he only made one mistake and it happens when the pocket collapses around you. He touches the ball more than anyone.
Yes. And 34 points are 34, and 41 are 41. And when you’re stuck on 33 — a far from shabby amount — that’s a problem.
I'm not blaming him for the loss. The post you quote says I'm putting it on the defense.
Actually, those with the hard on are those who say that regardless of what he does, he should never be blamed for anything
I am optimistic that the 4 seed AFC Black and Purple division will beat them.
Brady played an incredible game. Yes, he made a mistake, but mistakes are going to happen when you touch the ball 50 times. The loss isn't on his shoulders.
This is semantics
I'll grant you that Brady played a great game (minus his lack of situational awareness at the end of the first half). I'll grant you that there is blame to go around. Gostkowski missed kicks. The defense made worse plays than Brady all day long. The decision to leave Gronk on the field and McCourty on the bench for the last play (where a Hail Mary is unlikely so Gronk's skillset is less useful than McCourty's) is baffling.
Ridiculous comparison
My point is... one horrible play at the wrong time can be enough to earn goat horns.
It’s a shit analogy
There are mistakes and mistakes. Here, Brady lost situational awareness. That's different than a poor throw or a bad read. It's not reasonable to expect perfection from Brady. It is completely reasonable to expect him to know that he needs to throw it away to preserve a FG attempt, rather than taking a sack.
Not really a big deal, because we're talking about a fraction of a percent of win probability in either case, but in principle I absolutely agree with you here. It is correct to go for a TD on the fourth-down play, because a) you gain significant equity from the probability of icing the game right there, b) kicking off adds a completely unnecessary element of variance unless you decide to just kick out of bounds, and c) the opponent's equity from the possibility of kicking a FG is virtually non-existent in this scenario due the additional requirement that the previous play end with an out-of-bounds or defensive penalty.
The Denver game in '13 was an example of this. I don't think it is correct even there. This is very hard to prove, of course, but if you play around with TD/FG probabilities, you can see that the wind has to have a probably unrealistic level of impact in order to outweigh the advantage of receiving the ball first.
This is one nice thing about the concept of win probability - it obviates these silly attempts to find a single necessary-and-sufficient condition for a game outcome. For as long as I can remember, game post-mortems here have tended to feature at least one exchange that goes like this:
Give him a break, he doesn't know what to do when "Prom Night" is not an effective response.
Not really.
Apparently interesting enough to you for you to go out of your way to respond to it.
If he played a "great game," he's not a "worthy goat." That play was terrible and inexcusable. And without Brady playing great the rest of the day, they are not even in this game. They had no run game and the D was a sieve. Brady was terrific, had one brutal two-play sequence, and belongs nowhere near this thread. Certainly not on a day where the defense allowed 34 points to a weak offense, including the worst game-ending play of the Super Bowl era.
The OL was garbage today. 30 carries for 77 yards is a disgrace. The Dolphins came into this game allowing 5.0 yards per carry and the run game didn't even show up.
Read the thread. Gronk has been mentioned by many posters.
Yeah. I didn’t get to watch the game live but caught up and am amazed there are non-defense answers. Gost misses an XP and a 42 yard FG and some of the reactions are as if he Mason Crosby’d the game or something. That Brady sack play was bad. No bones about it. But he was very solid and basically the only reason we were in it. That bullet to Patterson was an absolute laser.
yeah, it seemed to be a regular defense except Gronk got in there for DMac.
Yep, 100% true. Gronk is usually out there in Hail Mary situations. The only problem is, Tannehill can't throw a football 75+ yards, which is what it would have taken to throw a Hail Mary from where they were on the field. So, the only thing they could have done, was what they did, a bunch of fucking laterals, and the last fucking thing you want to do when a team is trying that, is take out your best tacklers and fastest guys and replace them with an aging tight end who has been hurt all year.
The thing that's really frustrating about all this is for years one of the thing that always set Belichick and the Patriots above the rest is they always took the time to be prepared for all these weird end of game or otherwise unique situations.
At what point do we start facing difficult truths? You can’t lay this off on a coordinator — game is on the line there. Reputation usually lags performance, in both directions.
You are of course right that the D was pathetic. So was the running game, especially given how bad Miami has been all year against the run. And having Gronk in there at the end was idiotic.
You would have thought the near- miss by Chicago would have served as impetus to work on situational football. I guess not.
I wonder if it's even worth having a jump-ball specialist anymore. Even within Hail Mary range (50 yard line or so) teams have to think that a lateral play is a viable option.
