PostGame Thread Official Post-Game Thread: Patriots Lose to Commanders 20-17

[MahomestoKelce]

IF it wins them a couple of super bowls I agree… if not .. what good did all that capital gain them? I’m gonna bet dollars to donuts they blow the whole thing …

Yeah I have zero confidence they get that ship turned around. They have been mostly a mess for decades.

 

[lancerman]

Some folks for whatever reason don't want Mac to be accountable at all. Don't really understand the thought process myself.

This is a strawman. There's a difference between blaming Mac for the mistakes that are his fault and making massive reaches like blaming him for making a good throw in tight coverage during a 2 minute comeback drive because the receiver sucks and can't bring it in.

Brady made those throws all the time, those were like basic bread and butter tight coverage plays he used to slice teams up with when he had Edelman and Welker. And no he didn't wait until the 4th quarter or 3rd down to do that either. You trust your receiver to make those plays. And when he wasn't making those throws it was in years like 2013 and 2019 when he had no faith in his team. Patrick Mahomes routinely decides to make throws like that during games when he identifies that even if he knows the coverage is a little tight.

The bottomline is the receiver screwed up. It's so dumb that people are so desperate to blame Mac for absolutely everything because they can't handle that this is a garbage team WHEN HE MADE A GOOD THROW. If you have to rationalize it that you are doing mental gymnastics to say Mac was wrong for making a good throw when he's outside of field goal range, with less than 40 seconds left that would have at minimum put the team in field goal range to tie it because you think it was somehow safer to not take the opportunity and be in another 3rd and long all because the receiver is hot garbage and didn't do what he's paid to do..... I don't know what to tell you.

Maybe some people really need to look in the mirror when they make these strawmans and realize that it's not about other people not holding Mac accountable, and it's more about them NEEDING to hold Mac accountable for absolutely every flaw with this team because they can't cope with the idea that there are a lot of problems and it's not just one guy holding poor Bill Belichick and the rest of the players back.

Mac sucks, he made mistakes during the game. Guess what? You could have kept this exact performance and the Patriots still win this game if Reagor, Juju, and Parker make 3 catches that were well placed and hit them in the hands. That doesn't mean Mac's mistakes didn't contribute to the loss. It means the team has issues outside of the one player everyone wants to scapegoat. And this game was probably the best example so far we had of that because they could have won even with the exact same QB performance if other guys did their jobs and made plays that every receiver in the league is expected to make.

 

[1960Pats]

It was great seeing Slater clapping for his teammates from a few yards behind when they made plays. I bet his speech was great too.

Is it possible that Bill is actually tanking? None of his moves make sense otherwise.

And can Bill stop with the hiring of friends and drafting of players who play for friends or are the relatives of friends?

Someone needs to tell Bill that the players of today might be different from those of a half century ago.

Bill is a great HC but he ain't sh!t without players, just like EVERY HC.

I see a lot of complaining about how much the team sucks. Who picked those players that suck?

The NYFL is a league where you can turn things around quickly but not when the cupboard is bare. We may have a long wait.

 

[RodThePat]

This is a strawman. There's a difference between blaming Mac for the mistakes that are his fault and making massive reaches like blaming him for making a good throw in tight coverage during a 2 minute comeback drive because the receiver sucks and can't bring it in.

Brady made those throws all the time, those were like basic bread and butter tight coverage plays he used to slice teams up with when he had Edelman and Welker. And no he didn't wait until the 4th quarter or 3rd down to do that either. You trust your receiver to make those plays. And when he wasn't making those throws it was in years like 2013 and 2019 when he had no faith in his team. Patrick Mahomes routinely decides to make throws like that during games when he identifies that even if he knows the coverage is a little tight.

The bottomline is the receiver screwed up. It's so dumb that people are so desperate to blame Mac for absolutely everything because they can't handle that this is a garbage team WHEN HE MADE A GOOD THROW. If you have to rationalize it that you are doing mental gymnastics to say Mac was wrong for making a good throw when he's outside of field goal range, with less than 40 seconds left that would have at minimum put the team in field goal range to tie it because you think it was somehow safer to not take the opportunity and be in another 3rd and long all because the receiver is hot garbage and didn't do what he's paid to do..... I don't know what to tell you.

Maybe some people really need to look in the mirror when they make these strawmans and realize that it's not about other people not holding Mac accountable, and it's more about them NEEDING to hold Mac accountable for absolutely every flaw with this team because they can't cope with the idea that there are a lot of problems and it's not just one guy holding poor Bill Belichick and the rest of the players back.

Mac sucks, he made mistakes during the game. Guess what? You could have kept this exact performance and the Patriots still win this game if Reagor, Juju, and Parker make 3 catches that were well placed and hit them in the hands. That doesn't mean Mac's mistakes didn't contribute to the loss. It means the team has issues outside of the one player everyone wants to scapegoat. And this game was probably the best example so far we had of that because they could have won even with the exact same QB performance if other guys did their jobs and made plays that every receiver in the league is expected to make.

Everyone wants to scapegoat Mac? Name me ONE SINGLE other member of their absolutely putrid offense that has people writing paragraphs contextualizing criticism directed towards them? Point me to one post in the same vein as yours in response to criticism of the receivers or the OL. Just one. Mac isn't a scapegoat, he's the only player on that side of the ball that people are still willing to stand up and "yeah, but..." for, and god only knows the reason.

 

[lancerman]

Hate to break it to you but our defense and special teams are bad too.

In 2023 WR matters. How fans on this board keep ignoring that I don't know. It's total myth that we never had talent at receiver.

Moss, welker, Edelman, Gronk, Hernandez....all elite talents.

All the best teams in the NFL have elite receivers

Yup, Gronk, Moss and Welker were All Pro level pass catchers. Hernandez and Edelman were routinely top 10. Many of thsoe guys overlapped. From 2007-2018 we had extremely high quality pass catchers. We also had guys like Cooks who we traded for. Our 2's and 3's were guys like Amendola and Hogan who would have been #1's on this squad.

YES you could argue that the 01-04 run we didn't. But that was largely before some massive rule changes that dramatically inflated the passing game and we still had guys like Brown and Branch who would have easily been number 1's on this team. And one year we felt the need to go get Corey Dillon to be a feature back

But people are revising history to act like the bulk of our run we didn't have good pass catchers. We had fantastic pass catchers.

The issue is Belichick has never really felt the need to go after them in aggressive manners. Gronk sort of fell in the draft due to some injury questions and we got him and then his injuries made it easy for Belichick to keep him on incentive based contracts under market value. Moss looked like he might have been washed and Bill got him for a steal and then he got remotivated. Welker was a diamond in the rough that Miami didn't value enough. And Edelman was drafted as a 7th round QB who worked his ass off and became the WR he did.

I won't say that's all luck, but we were very fortunate we got that value out of guys like that while taking a low value approach to pass catching.

The problems crept up after we traded Cooks in the 2018 off season and had a carousal of replacing him before the season. Yeah we tightened up at the end and won a Super Bowl when Gronk returned to form and Edelman still had it, but most of that season, you could see issues in the armor. Then Bill went into 2019 with similar issues going through all these WR's again like Thomas, AB, Gordon etc and that's when we kinda hit a point of no return that we never came back from.

 

[MrBigglesWorth]

Like Tom Curran said, you couldn't have built a worse roster even if you tried.

In the end they're cheap

 

[lancerman]

Everyone wants to scapegoat Mac? Name me ONE SINGLE other member of their absolutely putrid offense that has people writing paragraphs contextualizing criticism directed towards them? Point me to one post in the same vein as yours in response to criticism of the receivers or the OL. Just one. Mac isn't a scapegoat, he's the only player on that side of the ball that people are still willing to stand up and "yeah, but..." for, and god only knows the reason.

Name me one member of their horrible offense that has dedicated posters that make dozens of posts every thread crying about them? I don't see constant threads about how Parker sucks or posters who have outright been called out by mods on this site for constantly making off topic posts about Mac. I've yet to see posters make stupid statements like Wozzy that replacing Mac with any average QB would automatically turn a bottom tier offensive line into a good one magically about other positions on the offense even though those critiques are so devoid of reality and logic.

But let's just stay at the topic on hand and get really narrow. Show me one player on the team who made a good play that was the correct throw in the right placement that almost everyone acknowledges was a good throw that was desperately spun into somehow blamimng him for the other player screwing it up. Right now I'm not defending Mac from being a good QB. I'm defending him from getting critcism from.... making a good throw. That's what is being argued right now.

When other players get critcized when they make good plays because people can't go one or two posts without finding fault with him, when posters are getting yelled at by mods for going off topic and spamming multiple threads to cry about a player even when it isn't relevant, and when delusional takes like "bottom tier units would be turned into top tier units if you replaced this one player" are being levied at someone besides Mac... you will probably start seeing push back against those obsessive and delusional arguments that are just vent posting. If you can't understand that, you probably shouldn't have responded.

It's pretty simple. Mac gets disproportionate amount of blame even when he makes a good play because someone else ****ed up. So people who notice defend him. The first two weeks we had a WR who couldn't make a toe tap and a fumble by a ball carrier that ended what could have been comeback drives. Certain posters wanted to ignore context and say "oh that's just more proof Mac can't make a comeback". Those same posters are now blaming him for making the correct throw that would have put them in game tying field goal range because someone else didn't do their job. No **** he gets defended when people are that desperate to push a narrative that they block out all logic to hit their canned talking points

 

[cmasspatsfan]

Everyone wants to scapegoat Mac? Name me ONE SINGLE other member of their absolutely putrid offense that has people writing paragraphs contextualizing criticism directed towards them? Point me to one post in the same vein as yours in response to criticism of the receivers or the OL. Just one. Mac isn't a scapegoat, he's the only player on that side of the ball that people are still willing to stand up and "yeah, but..." for, and god only knows the reason.

Did you read his whole post?

 

[lancerman]

It’s absolutely hysterical that people here ask “well what would you have done differently huh?” to defend Belichick. Well none of us are getting paid $20-25 million a year to figure this all out. He is. WE don’t need to know the correct way. He does. And he failed.

It's not even like there is some crazy answer. We went into last off season knowing WR and OL were issues and we didn't really do anything to address it. Our offense was a liability and we let two of our most important offensive skill players go (Meyers, Harris). Now our offense is dreadful. Doesn't take a braintrust to figure some of this out. But Belichick is too wise for such notions

 

[lancerman]

Did you read his whole post?

We know the answer to that.

 

[jdlboot14]

Absolute truth as been established.
Mac is not a world beater, but he is capable of winning. This loss is not on Mac. Period.
All have attested, this Pats team has one of the worst talent levels in the NFL.
So, who could win in this offense? Mahomes or Lamar could do enough to win that game, but that's about it.
We can't tell if those "bad throws" were actually right, and the WR's are that out of sync... which is likely looking at the WR room.
It was clear TT was running horrible routes, and got benched. That first "wide open miss" might not have been Mac's bad throw, but it was expecting TT to run an out and he just ran a corner.
Point is - BB put this sack of garbage in the cupboard, so this is what we get.

 

[archstanton543]

It's not even like there is some crazy answer. We went into last off season knowing WR and OL were issues and we didn't really do anything to address it. Our offense was a liability and we let two of our most important offensive skill players go (Meyers, Harris). Now our offense is dreadful. Doesn't take a braintrust to figure some of this out. But Belichick is too wise for such notions

BB would beg to differ citing the Geiseki and JuJu signings and the Anderson and Reiff signings. Not to mention the mid-to-late round picks he used on O-line guys.

 

[lancerman]

Good to elite QBs keep their bad decisions to a minimum and make plays regardless of the talent level around them. If the talent is lacking they just won't have gaudy numbers.

It's obvious Mac makes more bad decisions and is accurate than most.

We should look at the talent surrounding the current elite QB's before we make that decision.

Mac shouldn't be the QB next year, but the next QB shouldn't come into a ****show like this either. There's a reason why the Dolphins got talent for Tua and now Flores looks like a fraud for wanting to move on. There's a reason why Diggs saved Allens career. There's a reason why Mahomes came out hot with what he had in KC. There's a reason why the Bengals rushed to get Chase for Burrow. There's a reason why the Jaguars overpayed for Kirk to protect their investment in Lawrence. There's a reason why Herbert consistently has solid skill talent around him.

Regardless of who the QB is next year (and I agree, it should not be Mac), the clear formula in the modern in NFL is to get a good QB and then stack the deck with skill talent and a good offensive line around them. We haven't done that. And even if we get the next Tua, he's going to look like the bust Tua from a couple years ago and not MVP caliber Tua with Hill and Waddle.

No matter what, that issue has to be addressed.

 

[Lagaffe_07]

Absolute truth as been established.
Mac is not a world beater, but he is capable of winning. This loss is not on Mac. Period.
All have attested, this Pats team has one of the worst talent levels in the NFL.
So, who could win in this offense? Mahomes or Lamar could do enough to win that game, but that's about it.
We can't tell if those "bad throws" were actually right, and the WR's are that out of sync... which is likely looking at the WR room.
It was clear TT was running horrible routes, and got benched. That first "wide open miss" might not have been Mac's bad throw, but it was expecting TT to run an out and he just ran a corner.
Point is - BB put this sack of garbage in the cupboard, so this is what we get.

Are you serious?

Yeah everytime Mac miss a guy by 8 mile is because the receiver suck and can’t run a route right. Maybe it is also because the turf was too green and was screwing with Mac vision.

The Patriots would have won yesterday if Sam Howell was the QB.

 

[RobertWeathers]

We should look at the talent surrounding the current elite QB's before we make that decision.

Mac shouldn't be the QB next year, but the next QB shouldn't come into a ****show like this either. There's a reason why the Dolphins got talent for Tua and now Flores looks like a fraud for wanting to move on. There's a reason why Diggs saved Allens career. There's a reason why Mahomes came out hot with what he had in KC. There's a reason why the Bengals rushed to get Chase for Burrow. There's a reason why the Jaguars overpayed for Kirk to protect their investment in Lawrence. There's a reason why Herbert consistently has solid skill talent around him.

Regardless of who the QB is next year (and I agree, it should not be Mac), the clear formula in the modern in NFL is to get a good QB and then stack the deck with skill talent and a good offensive line around them. We haven't done that. And even if we get the next Tua, he's going to look like the bust Tua from a couple years ago and not MVP caliber Tua with Hill and Waddle.

No matter what, that issue has to be addressed.

Correct and my belief is BB saw Mac as not in the category of the QBs you mention.

 

[Rob0729]

Are you serious?

Yeah everytime Mac miss a guy by 8 mile is because the receiver suck and can’t run a route right. Maybe it is also because the turf was too green and was screwing with Mac vision.

The Patriots would have won yesterday if Sam Howell was the QB.

The problem is because of the current state of the team, we cannot know when Mac misses a receiver by 5-10 yards whether Mac made a horrible throw or the receiver just ran the wrong route. Why? Because either is very possible. For example, with missing Thornton. Mac has been off on down field throws in the past that were clearly on him and we have seen on other plays yesterday that Thornton cannot run a route if his life depended on it. So you could make a plausible case for Mac just making a horrible throw and a plausible case for Mac was throwing to a spot where Thornton was supposed to be and Thornton just ran a horrible route.

 

[RodThePat]

Name me one member of their horrible offense that has dedicated posters that make dozens of posts every thread crying about them? I don't see constant threads about how Parker sucks or posters who have outright been called out by mods on this site for constantly making off topic posts about Mac. I've yet to see posters make stupid statements like Wozzy that replacing Mac with any average QB would automatically turn a bottom tier offensive line into a good one magically about other positions on the offense even though those critiques are so devoid of reality and logic.

But let's just stay at the topic on hand and get really narrow. Show me one player on the team who made a good play that was the correct throw in the right placement that almost everyone acknowledges was a good throw that was desperately spun into somehow blamimng him for the other player screwing it up. Right now I'm not defending Mac from being a good QB. I'm defending him from getting critcism from.... making a good throw. That's what is being argued right now.

When other players get critcized when they make good plays because people can't go one or two posts without finding fault with him, when posters are getting yelled at by mods for going off topic and spamming multiple threads to cry about a player even when it isn't relevant, and when delusional takes like "bottom tier units would be turned into top tier units if you replaced this one player" are being levied at someone besides Mac... you will probably start seeing push back against those obsessive and delusional arguments that are just vent posting. If you can't understand that, you probably shouldn't have responded.

It's pretty simple. Mac gets disproportionate amount of blame even when he makes a good play because someone else ****ed up. So people who notice defend him. The first two weeks we had a WR who couldn't make a toe tap and a fumble by a ball carrier that ended what could have been comeback drives. Certain posters wanted to ignore context and say "oh that's just more proof Mac can't make a comeback". Those same posters are now blaming him for making the correct throw that would have put them in game tying field goal range because someone else didn't do their job. No **** he gets defended when people are that desperate to push a narrative that they block out all logic to hit their canned talking points

He's the quarterback. He's disproportionately important to their offensive success. Of course he gets more of the blame. This is the most basic stuff imaginable. Who got most of the laurels after their win against Buffalo?

You're obsessed with narratives and perception of the player. Just watch him play. So when Tyquan Thornton, widely regarded as a bust, creams the coverage running an over and gets a horrific pass, do people consistently bring that play up to defend him? When Mac gets good protection all game long and the offense sputters, will anyone bring this game up to defend the OL from criticism? When Mac throws a bad ball on fourth down and Juju makes an awesome catch, is that brought up as a response to people blaming him for the drop? Welcome to football. Sometimes you do your job and **** goes wrong. In analyzing the entirety of his performance and his process, Mac is not good enough. And it just so happens that not being good enough at his position is more crippling than not being good enough at any other position. Groundbreaking insight!

 

[holyredeemer]

Giants, AZ, Carolina and Bears are all clearly worse than pats. Best we can reasonably hope for is #5. We wont be getting Caleb Draye or Harrison
Unlless Mac gets injured or benched

Prepare for a long rebuild with or without BB

Alt will be the pick.

 

[Rob0729]

I know this is just media speculation, but if Belichick loses the locker room there is no going back. He is done. Once you lose players, it is near impossible to win them back. If Belichick does lose the locker room, there are really only two options: You cut all the players who have turned on Belichick even if that means you only have 5-10 players left under contract or you let go of Belichick. That is really it. And it is near impossible to cut 20-30 players who are part of your core without destroying the team for like five years or longer.

 

[PATRIOTSFANINPA]

One time who was right? About what? I've only been a Pats fan since '87 when I moved to the area, so I might have to refresh my memory with specifics, but I remember a ton.

Then you also remember the arrogance in sitting Wes Welker and Butler in big games that had effects on the outcomes ...