The Patriots should have at least gone to overtime Sunday in Las Vegas, but didn't thanks to an absolute disaster of a final play.
Rhamondre Stevenson picked up 23 yards on a draw play as the clock ticked down to zero, but instead of just going down once he was surrounded by Raiders, he lateraled the ball to teammate Jakobi Meyers.
Meyers then had an opportunity to just go down himself, but he compounded the madness by attempting a long backwards pass to quarterback Mac Jones that got picked off by Chandler Jones, who then stiff-armed Jones and took it to the house for a game-winning touchdown.
If you were expecting New England coach Bill Belichick to provide any sort of clarity about what happened and why, he wasn't about to do that after the game, opting instead to just say that his team made a mistake.
"Unfortunately here today we had too many -- we just collectively made too many mistakes and gave up too many big plays that were obviously the difference in the game," Belichick said to begin his press conference. "So, just can’t do that in this league, and it cost us. Have to work to eliminate those and continue to play the good football that we played."
Belichick was then asked if Stevenson had the green light to lateral the ball on the final play.
"Obviously we made a mistake on it," he said. "Made a mistake on the play."
Was there a coaching point to Stevenson to make it clear that he should just go down?
"Obviously that would've been better than the result," Belichick said.
Was that actually said to Stevenson?
"Yeah, look, we’ve talked about situational football. We talk about it every week," Belichick said. "But obviously we have to do a better job of playing situational football and not making critical mistakes in the game."
Belichick acknowledged a few other critical mistakes as well, including a blocked punt where the ball appeared to be snapped early and a false start by the offense on a goal-line play.
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