it sorta did matter as we had to punt and they got a fg out of it before HT
Not everything that happened in the game is directly linked to a coin flip or a missed XP.
But if you take out that first drive and everything plays out the exact same way (this is not the way the world works btw, but what the hell, enough people seem to think this way), then we still would have had to punt, and then they still get that FG, just sooner.
We just might have more time at the end, although I don't think we'd do much with it. For all we know, we could have been down more if we screwed around and got a punt blocked like against the Eagles. It's impossible to predict, but it really is silly to be spending this much time discussing this.
By not deferring, you give the possibility of the other team to score at the end, then score to begin. They didn't.
The team that starts with the ball scores first 60% of the time. But that means 40% of the time, they don't. We fell in that 40%. But again, it wasn't the reason we lost.
If it mattered that much, we might as well just forfeit once we don't score on the opening drive. The 23 hits on Brady, the porous OL, the lack of chipping, Miller and Ware spending more time in our backfield than our running backs, the DBs playing way off the receivers on that first drive, the blown coverage on Daniels, Collins losing Daniels, the big run that set up a FG, all those things mattered too. They all factored into our loss.
I know some fans gave up right after that first drive failed to score, while many others probably jumped on board the fail train after the Broncos scored first. But we had numerous opportunities to win this game, and not just by a bit, but a lot. They beat us on a ton of plays. They didn't just beat us on one or two key plays or a coin flip.