Every time there's a loss, somebody has to lose their head. I know a lot of jobs are like this where you find a scapegoat and blame them for everything, but really, it's a bit ridiculous. I will never forget the calls to cut Gronk after he caused a fumble and fumbled another one in that Cleveland loss.
So let's look at the whole body of work for the entire season instead of the lowest point. Otherwise, yeah, cut Gronk (he also had 3 drops in that Browns loss, and a penalty too).
Patriots ST:
- 7th in touchback %
- 2nd in kickoff return average allowed
- 2nd in field goal % (1st place Lions are 17 for 17, while Patriots are 26 for 27)
- 1 of 8 teams to be perfect from the new XP distance (46 attempts significantly more than the other teams. Jets are next with 37, Packers next with 32).
- 32nd in kick return average
- 8th in punt return average
- 2nd in 20+ yard punt returns
The one area that is very murky is punting. The stats are pretty awful for this, a lot of cumulative and very few averages. For example, Allen is 18th in punt average and 20th in punt net average. But part of that may be attributed to field position. For example, 46% of Allen's punts have landed inside the 20. The league leader in net average, the Ravens, only have 37%. I have no idea where he ranks in the league because I'm not going to calculate this for 32 teams. NFL, you can do this so easily. Why?
Including the Eagles game, the punt return yards allowed would put us at 12th. But that only works out to 8.3 yards per attempt. Again, no average allowed stat by the NFL and not going to calculate it for 32 teams, but FWIW, 8.3 YPA would rank 18th in the league for returns. 4 of the top 5 teams allowed under 8 YPA, but it's also worth noting without that one return by Sproles, our average is 5.9 YPA. Now every play counts, but with only 27 returns total, we're talking about extremely small sample sizes here.
So I think you have to look back to last year. We were 12th in punt average and 12th in punt net average. But only 38% of Allen's punts landed inside the 20. And despite the TD allowed this year, our 8.3 YPA on punt returns allowed is better than last season's 9.2 YPA. Again, small sample sizes, but over the course of the season, our punt coverage has been better this season than last, although big plays get considerably more notice.
Judge should be evaluated. So should Josh. So should BB and Tom and everybody who plays. And yes, Judge should get help. As should Josh. As should BB and Tom and everybody else too. But to single him out after one bad game is ridiculous. Josh's play calling set up the punt situation to begin with. Tom made some really poor decisions. The defense struggled with the run game. The OL struggled all night. There was plenty of blame to go around that night. Focusing solely on Judge won't fix all of the things that went wrong.
