Captured footage from my house around 4:15 yesterday.

giphy

After a fairly good first half in South Florida yesterday, the Patriots came out in the second half and did nothing. They didn’t score at all after putting up 20 points in the first half, and gave up 23 points to the Dolphins. Both lines were pretty dreadful and halftime adjustments seemed non-existent. Miami won going away, 33-20.

The result was the first opening day loss for the Patriots since the 31-0 debacle to open the 2003 season.

A performance like that draws the trolls, and they love nothing better than taking victory laps on afternoon’s like yesterday.

The Globe again has it’s day-after special football section for this season, which will this season include a Monday sports media column from Chad Finn. This week he looks at the game day offerings and ahead to the certain caterwauling of sports radio this week.

On the media front, you should also check out Finn’s Friday column on the history of the sideline reporter, check out last week’s edition of Patriots Football Weekly for my column on the various sideline reporting changes this offseason, and look at the New York Post’s article on Jenny Dell who is working as an NFL sideline reporter for CBS.

Tom Brady made his weekly appearance on Dennis and Callahan and Minihane this morning, and no one knows better than he that there is a lot of work to be done.

Get all the coverage from yesterday’s game at PatriotsLinks.com.

If you’re interested in deep, football-focused talk, check out Matt Chatham’s new site footballbyfootball.com, where he has NFL players weighing in and analyzing happenings around the league.

It will be a long week. No doubt about that. It’s already begun, and will not cease until the team wins a game convincingly.

This team will be fine.   There may be more rough patches ahead until roles and rotations are settled, but this is a good team. Despite what you’ll hear, see and read this week.

Published by Bruce Allen

Automattician.

16 thoughts on “About That Miami Game…”

  1. Just to inform everyone that we’re prohibited from talking about the NFL this week. If you do, it means you hate women:

    @Jezebel: If you care about women and still support the NFL, you are a hypocrite http://bit.ly/1q7sUxn

    Same place that had no problem linking up all the leaked nude photos last week from The Fappening, across multiple sites, and featuring the links. Wait, what?

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    1. Guess I’m a hypocrite then. And so is my girlfriend, mom, and grandmother. Because they all watched football from Thursday on through tonight.

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  2. They looked bad, no doubt. And there should be a lot of criticism for a lot of people today: Brady, Belichick and the entire coaching staff, offensive line, run defense, and defense as a whole. But it’ll be the typical sky-is-falling overreaction by local media instead of a measured response. Could yesterday be the start of a disasterous season? Sure, anything is possible. But this coach and QB have earned the benefit of the doubt. A hallmark of BB’s tenure has been bouncing back after losses. I would expect them to do so next week against Minnesotta and win convincingly. If they fail to do so and lose again, then we’re in uncharted territory and it would be approriate to question how good this team actually is. In my opinion, that’s the kind of analysis we should be hearing today.

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    1. Excellent take on it, OLH ..If the O-Line looks as bad against Vikes as it did against Dolphins then my finger might get closer to “panic button” but not yet….AND not making excuses but Cameron Wake is a BEAST and the rest of their D-line is very good…

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      1. And they always play poorly in Miami, 2007 and Brady to Welker for 99yds notwithstanding. Was it 2009 or 2010 when “we” were 10-2 r something and Miami was 2-10 and they kicked our ass on Monday Night? Belichick famously used that example to fluster Holley last season, IIRC.

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  3. The EXACT same trolls caterwauling about the trade of Mankins, watched the pocket collapse around Brady throughout last season and against the Broncos in the AFC champ game and spent the entire time caterwauling about Brady’s lack of weapons.

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    1. Beetle didn’t take the bait when Felger and Mazz dangled the low hanging fruit of “we win that game with Mankins!!!” for everyone to jump at. Good for him. Last I checked, Mankins plays guard and Cameron Wake is a DE, so how does he help that?

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  4. Is Ron Borges on the phone with TMZ to see if they can, somehow, obtain the footage from Hernandez’s place on the night of the Odin Lloyd killing?

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  5. Buckle up!

    @BrodyLogan Harvey Levin from @TMZ told @TonyPerkinsFOX5 they will release news tomorrow that the NFL knew about the Ray Rice video & turned a blind eye

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  6. I thought, as usual, Gresh & Zo lead the way with their analysis of the game. They just told it like it was from the perspective of two ex-jocks and didn’t freak out about anything. Not like the “sky is falling” hysteria that started at 1pm. D&C&M did alright too. I was able to podcast some of Dale & Holley but it was all Ray Rice and player interviews.

    Gresh and Zo are just hands down the BEST football driven show in the market and nobody is even close. Except tomorrow…..when they have Shaunessey troll everybody for an hour.

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  7. Bruce I agree with you that the Pats should be fine. What was lost in most of the coverage is that for the first 30 minutes they played a pretty tight and disciplined game on both sides of the ball. In the second half it appeared their conditioning failed them. I am not taking anything away from Miami who exploited that and really took it to both lines at the point of attack. I wonder if the Pats psyched themselves out with all the Miami weather talk going into the game (it sounded awful similar to Denver altitude talk). The game was played at 91F and yet the Pats were all gassed in the second half after a long summer of practices. It just seemed odd to me, completely out of character. Of course the brilliant media coverage has not touched on this point at all. Between the sky falling and the Ray Rice issue (holy carp Batman did the NFL get that one wrong), there was not a lot of time and or space for some reasoned analysis.

    What will be interesting to see is how Bill Belichick fixes these problems and many more:

    – Why was Tom Brady overthrowing and floating balls? Was he unable to plant the front foot because of pain in his calf? Did he cramp as the game went along like Revis did?

    – Will Bryan Stork be healthy enough to insert in the center spot. This should have several positive effects. He brings an attitude to the run game, he kicks Connelly out to guard permanently, and he would give the line continuity in their rotations (you would not need to be switching out your center (the line signal caller) from series to series.

    – There used to be a poster on the old Patriots USENET board named John Larkspur who was never a fan of Bill Belichick defenses (he called them Belichicken defenses). His argument was the defense played so disciplined that it traded aggression for safety…the whole bend don’t break philosophy. With the quality of the corners the Patriots have, perhaps Belichick should turn the dogs loose and let them go aggressively upfield after the QB. It is not a talent issue it is a scheme issue.

    – In that same vein, the Pats run defense was completely obliterated in the second half. I can’t remember the last time WIlfork was run on so easily. Miami ran right at him in the second half. In the first half he held his ground. Was that conditioning? Can BB and Matt Patricia get back to basics and fix that issue.

    – Will the special teams protection units get fixed?

    – Will the return of Aaron Dobson open up the middle of the field? Will Danny Amandola get open any time soon.

    – Will the Pats look to pick up an blocking tight end or is that going to be Gronks role for the rest of the year?

    We will see. My bet is the Pats bounce back…I can’t remember the last time they played 2 stinkers in a row. Its just frustrating because when they lose like they did, it ruins the week.

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  8. Tons of takes and stuff out there about the NFL/Rice stuff. This is the best I’ve read so far on the media angle behind it from Mike Sielski with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

    Always, this story would have to be broken by someone outside the league’s purview, which meant that the likes of Adam Schefter, Chris Mortensen, Peter King, and Jay Glazer – those insiders feeding us morsels of preapproved info – were never going to get this scoop. They are not outside the NFL’s culture. They inhabit it.

    …

    Yet when we spend all this time and money on what we think people want, we often end up closing the distance between ourselves and those we’re supposed to keep honest. That’s a dangerous posture to fall into, because incidents such as this one – a sports figure doing something incompetent or unseemly or downright awful, such as beating his fiancee
    until she’s unconscious – occur frequently enough that we always should be ready for them. Too often, we aren’t

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  9. I’m sure this won’t draw my usual array of thumbs up responses, but I have to agree with Janay Rice’s wife on this one. None of this, is frankly, any of my business.

    And it seems to me that the only reason that people like Adam Jones, Mike Mutnansky, Lou Merloni and the millions of others are calling for the jobs of Roger Goodell, Harbaugh and Ozzie Newsome is because it makes them feel good to wag their fingers at these people. None of these people, no not even Jezebel, care about Janay Rice. Nor should they, but that’s the point. Not only do people not care about Janay, but they’re using this new news as a means to look down at and wag their fingers at Janay!

    The most uprated comment on ProFootballTalk?

    flash1287 says:
    Sep 9, 2014 8:55 AM
    Translation : you’re taking my MONEY away from me
    1222 67

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    1. Interesting to read that some minority players are saying that RR should be getting help from the NFL and not demonization. I concur. RR shouldn’t lose his career over this. And Donald Sterling shouldn’t have lost his team.

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  10. Tim Benz now spending time speculating on whether or not the Ravens will put up a statue of Ray Rice and/or elect Ray Rice to their HoF.

    This is a man (Benz) that I’m supposed to take seriously?

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