So our entire 2007 offense was better than the 2014 offense, who beat a better defense in the Superbowl than the 2007 offense lost to? Sounds legit.
I give 2007 a lot of praise for what it did before the 2009 rule changes, but it was a regular season offense. What 2014 did in the playoffs, starting with the Ravens, then Indy, then Seattle, was far and away superior to 2007, not to mention it ended with a Lombardi.
Maybe it was a bad Belichick game plan, or maybe it was a lot more gimmicky and Peytonesque which is why it eventually got punched in its mouth.
The 2014 team > 2007.
We choked against the Gintz twice, or the dice rolled against us, or BB just got too misty eyed walking through the meadowlands for NFL films and couldn't bring himself to beat Coughlin (joke there)... whatever you want to say.
This offense is better because it won. Is Jo Jo Lafell better than Gronk? Is Edelman better than WWW at his prime? Is this defense worse than the 2011 defense? I don't think any of these statements are true in a vacuum.
But in the 2008 SB we scored fewer points, we allowed fewer points, and we lost the game.
It wasn't what happened in
almost the last second, it was about responding to it. Now, again, small sample size. Maybe at that level, it's all just rolls of the dice. But I think the SB 49 crew said "Okay, now we'll make the dice roll
our way" (yes that's the defense, but I'm trying to get across the team's character...)
Is the character of that offense - of that full team - the equivalent or better than 2014's team? No. It could not, ultimately, cope with adversity and with their opponent playing out of their heads better than they ever had before. It let down in the biggest game of the year, and, if they won, of history (if you think about it.)
That offense couldn't crack 20 points against a team that backed into the playoffs after showing every sign of not wanting to be there.
That Brady couldn't do what
this Brady could do, admit there was not a big shirt with an "S" on it under his jersey.
This year's Brady didn't curl into a manly fetal position, he took whatever precious time his O-line could give him and lived with the result.
That year's Brady, and
that year's O-line, was disrupted and stayed that way... and they were geared more to intermediate-to-long than to short-to-intermediate.
Dare I say it, they were dominant when it worked, but it was less versatile in the crunch, and had hardly been tested before.
Of course this team was also more balanced, with a credible run threat to keep the defense honest.
Okay long story short, where is Randy Moss's ring? WWW's? They're great ones, but they were part of team(s) that let down on the biggest stage. No fixing that.
