Monday Morning Ball Spot

Well, the season came and very quickly, and it's another long offseason until that first preseason game that you'll watch because you're so excited to see football, and then you'll realize how lame it is and be tortured for four more weeks. Plenty of time to be excited by free agents, and then disappointed when your team doesn't sign them, then get excited by the draft... and disappointed again when your team doesn't draft the right player. I can only hope that the Dolphins manage to draft another Ted Ginn Jr. and I can fall off my couch in surprise. 

Before all this though, we have the last Monday Morning Ball Spot of the Season. Several observations:

1. Corey Webster gets my MVP vote. His coverage exposed how one-dimensional the rest of the Patriots' offense truly is. Despite the talk about all the fantastic WRs, Randy Moss and the coverage he draws is clearly a big part of what makes this team tick. (Eli Manning was voted the MVP)
2. Injuries hurt New England. I believe Brady was injured. He was clearly having difficulty getting the deep ball going and the sacks didn't help (the Giants ended the game with 9). On several of the sacks you could see he tried to fall in such a way as to minimize any impact on his injured foot. Kevin Faulk also had a hamstring injury and he seemed to disappear from the game after that. It seems like the usually healthy Patriots took injuries at exactly the wrong time in the season. 
3. Jeff Feagles (Giants Punter) deserves a lot of credit. It was a low scoring game where a few more field goals on one side or the other would have been telling. Feagles kept the Patriots starting inside their twenty on at least three different drives, which kept them just out of field goal range at the end of their drives. He is one of the best punters in the league, and one of the only ones who still practices coffin corner kicking instead of pooch kicking (the difference is a pooch kick is just a straight, short kick forward that your coverage team is supposed to down close to the goal line, whereas a coffin corner kick goes out of bounds and is therefore angled sideways.) 
4. The Patriots coaching staff seemed unprepared. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it seemed like the Bill Belichick and his assistants were very off their game. The questionable fourth down call in the first half, where the Pats went for it instead of a 50 yard field goal, was key. But at the same time it can be justified by the fact that they actually had a good chance of getting the first down and I think the following Giants' drive was stopped just out of field goal range. What the biggest problem was that they didn't seem to be able to adjust to what the Giants were doing, which is surprising since Belichick is usually very good at making halftime adjustments. Brady would go on these streaks where he would repeatedly hit Welker across the middle and alternate it with screen passes. Then the Pats would try another couple long balls and get nothing from it. It was clear to me (see my posts) sometime in the second quarter that Brady was having trouble with the long ball, but the Patriots didn't even try to adjust by emphasizing short passes more. They kept trying to have Brady doing 5, 7, and 9 step drops and getting pressure because the Giants' D-Line was just not giving him that amount of time. A switch to a hurry-up offense would have minimized the repetition of a short passing and screen game, but the Patriots never even tried that. I think, above everything else, it was the Patriots coaching staff that lost this game. 

Thank you for dropping by today.