The Patriots lost to the Broncos on Sunday night in overtime, athrilling game that saw the Broncos rally back from down 14 points in the fourth quarter. It ruined the Patriots’ perfect season, handing them their first loss of the year.
The sad truth is, however, that the Patriots’ perfect season was already over. They hadn’t lost yet (and NFL pundits will all tell you that all that matters is wins and losses), but the Patriots’ quest for real perfection, the greatest NFL season ever, had ended a few weeks prior with the injuries to Dion Lewis and Julian Edelman. Those injuries did just enough to slow the Patriots down, to limit their options on an offense that had previously seemed unstoppable. Patriots fans knew it.
This was still an excellent team, one that was still a favorite to win the Super Bowl. But with Edelman and Lewis gone, the juggernaut was taken down a notch. The Patriots became a very good football team. Before that, they were as good a team as we had ever seen.
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If you look at the first nine weeks of the Patriots’ season, you see a team that was on pace historically to be one of the great teams ever. They won every game by at least a touchdown, with several of the games being total blowouts. Their offense scored at will. As I wrote back in October, the Patriots had assembled an offense that was not only excellent but versatile. They could line up two tight ends and hand the ball off to LeGarrette Blount and ram defenses with a power run game. They could open it up with Edelman, Rob Gronkowski, and Danny Amendola out wide. They could get Lewis running wheel routes out of the backfield. All with Tom Brady running the show. Defenses would commit to stopping Gronk, the Patriots would go to Blount and Lewis. They’d commit to stopping the run, the Patriots would get Amendola and Edelman going. There was nothing anyone could do.
The defense was vast improving, too. You saw it each week as they won, and the whispers got louder — We might be watching history. The Patriots’ numbers compared favorably to their 2007 season, when Brady tore up the record book en route to a perfect regular season and a gut-wrenching loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl. This was a team of destiny, born out of the fires of Deflategate, mad at the world and ready to take it out on anyone in their path.
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Then Lewis went down, and the Patriots weren’t as versatile. They found a replacement for him in James White, but White wasn’t quite as dynamic, not quite as electrifying a playmaker. One of Brady’s options was gone, and the Patriots became just a bit more predictable on offense.
Then Edelman went down, and it was right then that I knew the Patriots weren’t going to finish undefeated. While Brady is the brain, the field general, and Gronk the big, lovable weapon, Edelman was the heart of the Patriots’ offense. He made the whole thing go. He ran crossing routes fearlessly and could catch screens. He could throw a ball if you needed him to. He was the Swiss Army knife of the Patriots’ offense, a guy who embodied the way they did things.
When he went down, and Lewis already down, the Patriots went from an unstoppable juggernaut of an offense to one that was very good. And that’s the thing: Very good offenses can be stopped by very good defenses. The key to beat them became clear: Bottle up the run, double team Gronk. The Patriots could still score, but if a defense stopped the run and limited Gronk, the Patriots could be beaten. The Broncos did that.
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Gronkowski went down with an injury on Sunday night, and while itremains to be seen how serious it is, it is just another reminder of how hard it is to attain perfection. Injuries hurt every team, of course. The Patriots are not any more unlucky than anyone else this year. But their ceiling was higher. Some teams’ injury problems take them from good to bad or bad to awful. The Patriots are still excellent, but they could have been more. They could have been a team we talked about the rest of our lives.
