I do not think the outcome of this game has anything to do with the playoffs.
The only legit purpose of this year was to assess and develop the roster. We never had any chance at accomplishing anything in the playoffs, and very little chance of getting there.
Neither is it about some "missed call." It doesn't matter really. Focusing on it is an excuse, a distraction, from the core fact: this is a mediocre team which is so badly coached and marginally GM'd that there is little prospect of improvement. Nor is it about the collective brain fart that led to the gruesome ineptitude at game's end. Lousy teams just DO that sort of thing, and this - the REAL takeaway, once again - is a lousy team. They didn't get "robbed." They deprived themselves, from the beginning of the game to the end, of any opportunity to win it.
Nor is it about Mac Jones. It is a real question whether, given the idiotically mismanaged "coaching" staff, Mac has been afforded a legitimate chance at developing this year and showing what he can do. To this point, Mac has NOT, by any reasonable measure, shown that he is a worthwhile "franchise qb,"certainly, but we can draw no firm conclusion on this because the coaching has been so substandard. As for Zappe, he did earn a fuller evaluation, on the field, on game day; but he hasn't gotten it. Given this fact, and Mac's substandard work, there ought to be a genuine competition for qb next year, I suspect Mac would win that competion, but it might well show that neither of them is worth keeping.
The ball is in the Krafts' court. The issue, I say without any happiness at all, is Bill Belichick who, the evidence over the past few years shows, is no longer up to the job, at least as the Coach/GM job has been defined here for many years. He can't do it any more, and it is unclear in my mind - again, sadly - whether what he CAN do, whatever that may be, makes him worth holding on to.
There are, of course, a healthy number of sound and promising players on the team, and the team has shown resilience at times this year as a group in bouncing back from their too-frequent failures. Maybe in a way what I have said re Mac could be said of the team as a whole: we don't really know what they are because with respect to coaching, they have been so ill-served.
One final note: These are pretty dark times for this team. That's a fact. Given this, the asinine notion among certain mods and participants that any negative commentary re the team constitutes "trolling" has got to go. It's ridiculous, and offensive. We are not children subject to mandates that we limit ourselves to delusory happy talk. (And no, I personally have not been (so far? lol) accused of this so-called trangression, but others have: unnecessarily and unfairly, in my view.)
