Dude, I've been around here for a long time and, aside from my blinding hatred for the Jets and their fans, I'm pretty even keeled. I certainly take no pleasure in the erosion of Merriweathers game. Frankly, its rather perplexing! Not sure why posting a rather straight forward observation and opinion would raw such venom? As a life long Pats fan (since Steve Grogans rookie year) it would make me far happier if he were exceling the way I hoped and thought he would!
BelizePats - I don't think the above comments were reallly aimed at you.
Meriweather didn't have a great game tonight - I don't think anyone is trying to say that the play where he took a bad angle and ran into McCourty was good.
I think in general the frustration that I and a few other posters have had with some commenters on this board is that Meriweather has essentially become a target of a disproportionately large amount of criticism compared to his quality of play.
Meriweather, by and large, has had a strong NFL career, and while his stats this year are a little less impressive than they were this year, he has still been an ironman for this team (pretty sure he played almost every snap of every game last year, he's played almost every snap of every game this year when he hasn't been sat by BB for disciplinary reasons)
And most of the time, when BM does his job, nobody notices, since he's playing the deep coverage safety for our defense. Tonight - he screwed up, in a pretty big way, and it resulted in a TD and made himself look pretty stupid. The problem is that people don't see that 99% of the other plays where a qb looks to throw a deep ball and meriweather's coverage prevents him from throwing it and he's forced to check down to a shorter or more intermediate route - that's Meriweather playing effective defense.
Meriweather made a mistake tonight, and he has regressed since playing like an all-world safety for the first half of last season, and it is disappointing. But you know who else makes mistakes and suffers setbacks? Every other DB on the roster (with the possible exception of Devin McCourty)
Peyton Manning victimized Pat Chung (of whom i am also a big fan) for two quick tds to Austin Collie in the Colts game and that allowed the Colts to come storming back - if Meriweather had let up those tds this board would have been calling for his head.
Sanders has played unbelievably well this year, but every year before this one, he routinely frustrated people by being a step slow and allowing big plays.
Bottom line is Meriweather is a solid player for the pats, and I am of the opinion that if you replaced him with an average-to-decent safety our defense would suffer for it. That doesn't mean he shouldn't be criticized when he screws up - it should just also mean that people should appreciate what he brings to the table just as much as they hate what he takes away from it.
