Cirio said:
Point I'm trying to make is, you can't just blame the Pats defense and not give the Seahawks offense credit at the same time. The Hawks played perfect football, and they deserve credit for that rather than a "Seattle of all teams can score, so you must be in trouble" type of statement. Also, the Pats defense were not the only ones to blame. It was their offense that coughed up NE's 2 turnovers that ultimately cost them the game. And despite all of that, it was Tom Brady who couldn't punch the ball in when it mattered. |
No one's denying that Seattle deserves a lot of credit. With that said, there's a sizeable amount of blame to lay at New England's feet (mostly the defense, but offense as well). Allowing an offense to score on 78% of their drives is simply unacceptable, regardless of how good said offense is. Seattle definitely didn't play a perfect game, either, between penalties, dropped passes (especially one that should have given them a touchdown on their first drive), and another questionable decision by Pete Carroll at the end of the game.
The defense blew assignments on a number of plays and left Seahawks' receivers wide open. The Patriots failed to get the edge and let Prosise run off tackle for big chunks of yards on way too many occasions. Justin Coleman got beat deep on at least 5 separate occasions. Maybe the Seahawks still win even if those mistakes aren't made, but that's not even the concern for me as a Patriots fan at this point. The concern is that if those mistakes keep getting made, New England may very well find itself in a playoff game where those mistakes are the difference between winning and losing. Regardless of how much credit Seattle deserves or whether they would've made those plays without the mistakes, the defense cannot continue to play like that going forward, or NE will be looking at an early playoff exit.
Offense played poorly too at times and was uncharacteristically sloppy. I'm less concerned with the offense, however, because the kind of mistakes made there are ones that are easily correctable. Brady needs to avoid throwing "Who the hell was that too?" passes, make sure receivers hold on to the ball tight. Those aren't really things that the offense has struggled with in the past, either, which suggests to me that this is likely more of a temporary lapse and a wake up call than an omen of things to come. The defense has struggled in similar manners to how they did last night, and the fact that the struggles seem to be getting even worse (admittedly, against a better offense) is a cause for concern because it's a consistent trend.
