BB was thoroughly outcoached by Sparano yesterday. The RB option play routinely killed them and just when the Pats thought they had it defensed, Ronnie Brown throws for a TD; The Pats were set up beautifully by the Dolphins on that. Lost in the amazing game Ronnie Brown had was Pennington's sick performance, much of which the Pats deserve an assist. The book on Pennington is to clog the middle of the field and have CBs cheat on inside routes, daring Pennington to beat them with his noodle arm to the outside. Yet the Pats routinely let the TE get open or got beat on skinny posts. Horrible defense all around.
On the other side of the ball, the Dolphins let Cassel throw a bunch of junk underneath, daring him to look more than 5 yards downfield and guessed right he wasn't up to the task. One of the longest (if not the longest...I forget) completions was a deflection to Welker that should have been a pick. The replay that showed Dave Thomas get wide open for a TD, but Cassel didn't see him summed up the day the passing offense had. To top it all off, the pass protection looked like the garbage we saw in August.
I'm keeping my eyes open because the D yesterday looked a lot like it did in the preseason: Giving up a high percentage of passes and getting pushed around in the trenches. Now in the preseason one can argue that the Pats were playing "vanilla" defense, were not gameplanning against the opposing team, etc. We all thought this could be a great defense. Still, don't "great" defenses dictate the action, being proactive instead of reactive? Great defenses force the offense to adjust and still tend to hold strong. Great defenses aren't the ones forced to be reactive. The Pats seem to fall under the category of "well coached defense", one that reacts surperbly to what the offense does. Unfortunately, when they aren't well coached, the results are much like what we saw yesterday and in the preseason.
Regards,
Chris