Thoughts on the Patriots' noncompetitive Super Bowl loss to the Seahawks

Monday 2/9/26

Well, that was obviously a tough one for the Patriots last night, but I don't think you can really be too upset if you're a New England fan. As I wrote here, I didn't think they had much of a shot unless Drake Maye played a great game, and I don't think he's capable of that right now. Not on this stage.

Maybe he won't ever be. I'd say the chances of that are better than that he is. The playoffs really exposed him. Surely this is the worst postseason a run a quarterback who made the Super Bowl has had. Last night he wasn't much better than C.J. Stroud was against the Patriots a few weeks ago, and that may have been the worst game a quarterback has ever had in the playoffs.

I say you can't really be upset because the Patriots were fortunate to be here. I was consistent in how I treated their season, once they showed themselves capable of stringing wins together. The league was wide open, especially the AFC. I gave the Patriots a legit chance to emerge from that conference, which isn't the same as thinking they were a very good team.

They got all the breaks until the didn't. And they needed all of those breaks to make to to the Super Bowl. They needed the favorable schedule especially early on so they could stack some wins, build confidence, and Vrabel could impose his mindset and get buy in. This isn't a talent-rich roster. It's a bunch of stray pieces. They don't have difference makers. They don't have guys to fill up the stats sheets.

They had favorable conditions and they gelled and made the most of their season. And then some. They needed a warm weather team with a shaky playoff quarterback in Bobby Herbert to come to Foxborough in the first round. They needed C.J. Stroud to turn in his abomination of a performance. They needed Bo Nix to stay healthy long enough for Denver to dispatch Josh Allen and the Bills. Then they needed Nix to get hurt after that was accomplished and Jarrett Stidham to take over. And then they still needed a perfectly-time snowstorm to get past the Broncos.

Patriots fans, predictably, are like, "They'll be back soon," all of that. Chances are greater that Maye never returns to the Super Bowl again than that he does. That's just how it goes. This isn't basketball. You can go generations without your team playing in a Super Bowl. What are the chances the Pats are back in this game next year? I say close to zero. What teams appear in the finals, in any sport, in back-to-back years? Special teams. Teams making a run on history in their sport. Do you think that's these Patriots? I don't.

There'll be a harder schedule. Vrabel's thing will wear off some. You get a one-year boost with a new coach. Then, it's like life. Shit wears off. Can he coach? Didn't look much like it last night. My feeling with Vrabel is that he implements a mindset, an attitude. That serves you well right off the bat.

Long term? It fades. That kind of thing is the boards. Long-term coaching success, though, is the bolts. The binding. The nails. That's game plans, innovating, talent evaluation. Last night, I saw a team with no answers and a very lacking plan to begin with. You had to have known what your problems were going to be in terms of the Seattle defense and their ability to pressure the quarterback, especially coming off that edge where the woeful Will Campbell is stationed. Seems like apt word--stationed like a traffic cone. Save when he false started and jumped.

If you go through this record, you'll see that my thoughts on his play throughout the season remained constant. I thought he was bad. I don't think it's mostly an experience thing. He just might not be that good. There was no way you could win with him playing like he did--your right guard allowed fourteen pressures; fourteen!--unless Maye found a way around Campbell's poor play, and Maye wasn't much better.

Here's my concern with Maye, and after watching these playoffs, I'm far less sanguine about his career moving forward than I was around Christmas. There was a time this year when he looked like the best QB in the league, but Maye had a deceiving year. It's confusing because he's really a game manager...but one who relies on a few big plays a game in which he throws the ball down the field. It's a strange hybrid. I don't believe you can give him the game and say, "All right, this baby is yours, go out and throw for the win for us. Throw us to victory!"

Brady wins that game last night. I have no doubt in my mind. Maye's season was a bunch of games where he wouldn't have a huge volume of pass attempts, he'd have the high completion percentage, and there he'd be at 270 yards.

Remember how I kept pointing out that yardage? No one else did. People don't pay attention to that. There was never a contest where he threw for 435 yards, slinging it and slinging his team to victory in the process. Things seem to need to be going well for him, and then he...game manages. With some long passes sprinkled in. This year, a bunch of those passes hit. That's not high percentage stuff, though. The odds catch up with you. You ideally want to be a guy whose forte is completing intermediate throws. Intermediate routes, and you throw seam-bifurcating lasers. Like Brady. And smart short passes.

I think this Patriots team will be remembered--not that people can think or remember much of anything, but play along with me--as an anomaly. Like a supersized version of the 2021 Patriots team. Fool's gold. I was hoping that they'd keep what they had rolling, find ways to win, keep getting the breaks, make it to the big game, and get some more breaks, and basically purloin a Super Bowl title.

Land one on the sly, almost. Because you get to a winner-takes-all-game, and anything can happen. You might only beat that team one out of ten times, and you need them to put the ball on the carpet thrice and throw an interception or two, but that happens. But last night was one of the nine times, rather than that one.

I felt early on--after two Patriots possessions--that they only chance they had to win that game was if the defense scored some points for them. They needed a pick-six, for the defense to mostly hold, and like a touchdown and a field goal from the offense so they could grind out some 16-13 type of win. They looked ill-prepared to me. Strategically ill-prepared.

Josh McDaniels had nothing. Not for starters, not as a go-to/alternative look/Plan B. I don't understand that. I also thought that Maye would have been more valuable running the ball than throwing it. His passing has been terrible. Easy misses, bad footwork, no sense of time. He's sped up, then he's slowed down. He's jittery, he's not cognizant of the encroaching pass rusher. He looks passive. On the second fumble he looked almost frail to me. I thought of Cam Newton not wishing to jump on that ball back in his Super Bowl appearance.

A lot of praise has been thrown Christian Gonzalez's way. He's good, but he's not great. Sure, he made some nice plays on the ball, but he had to because he'd already been beat. On the whole, the Patriots' defense was good. They showed up and stepped up throughout the playoffs. This offense was bad for four games. Bad, bad, bad. That's a quarter of an NFL schedule back when it was sixteen games.

No matter how well your defense is playing, thought, there's only so much they can do for your team in terms of protecting the fort when you keep going three-and-out, three-and-out, three-and-out and as soon as they get off the field they're going back out there.

That was one of the least competitive Super Bowls we've had. Game wasn't as close as the score, which seemed, paradoxically, almost academic/moot all along. You never sensed the Patriots were in the thing. From the first two plays. Pats kick off, kick it out of the end zone, Seahawks get the ball at the 35--which I think is a ridiculous rule, especially with how field goal kickers are now, because you go twenty-five yards, that's it, and boom, you're in scoring range--and they break off a nice run on first down and a tone was set. I know, so early. It's just how I felt.

I suppose there was a brief moment when the Patriots got on the board where you might have been doing some math in you head. I was. I thought, "Okay, if they can get Seattle to turn it over inside of their own thirty-five, and can punch it in fast, then might have a shot..." but that math went bye-bye when Drake Maye threw one of the worst interceptions you'll ever witness. A total head scratcher. Like...why did you throw that ball where you threw it? No Patriots receivers were in the vicinity. Didn't look like someone ran the wrong route.

Against the Bears in '85, the Pats scored first, so you had a few moments of hope as a Pats fan. I didn't feel that at any time last night. The Seahawks are good. Sam Darnold is good enough to win you one once. The Vikings made a big mistake in letting him go, and that's before we get into who they installed as his replacement.

Maye's game went in one direction, and Darnold's went in the opposite, come the playoffs. Trains passing in the night. Darnold is a better quarterback right now than Drake Maye. In a chips-on-the-table setting, anyway. Darnold turned the ball over more than anyone else in the regular season, but he got that cleaned that up, didn't he? He was turnover-free in the playoffs. They had the one less game as the top seed, but still, that's impressive.

But: It was a good season. Lots of entertainment. You got your money's worth with the 2025 Patriots. It's hard for me, though, to not see what I saw as the proverbial flash in the pan. Hope I'm wrong, just like I hoped I was wrong with who I thought would take that game last night and take it convincingly.

It was a weird season. Weird seasons are usually one-offs. They don't get replicated. They were just this thing that happened, and you hope that they happened to the fullest degree that they could happen. This one didn't. The Patriots winning the Super Bowl would have felt, I think, like the proverbial highway robbery. Nor do I think that conception would have faded much over time. So, I'm disappointed, but nothing more than that.

You got more games than you had any expectation of getting. But along you were witnessing something...blip-y. That's the challenge, though, isn't it? Reload, get your head right, make changes, evolve, grow your game, go to another level. As a player, a coach, as members of a staff, as a team. It'd be great to see the Patriots be able to do that.

Anyway. BC-BU Beanpot championship tonight. Red Sox spring training right around the corner. Sports life goes on.