FOXBOROUGH -- Miami didn’t need a miracle to shock Bill Belichick and the Patriots in Sunday night’s season finale at Gillette Stadium.
Nope, in a matchup that Belichick hyped up all week as a playoff game, Ryan Fitzpatrick’s Dolphins simply outplayed Tom Brady, Stephon Gilmore and the playoff-bound Patriots for the comeback 27-24 win that bumped New England from the No. 2 seed and forces the defending champs to play this coming week on Wild Card Weekend.
Fitzpatrick drove 75 plays in 13 plays to a 5-yard touchdown to Mike Gesicki with 24 seconds to play, picking on Gilmore with DeVante Parker along the way as he had done all afternoon.
The home squad was then left to its own desperation, razzle-dazzle play as the clock expired but couldn’t pull off close to the miracle that the Dolphins did last December in Miami.
Nope, Miami flew home the victors, having won five of its final nine games of ol’ friend Brian Flores’ first season in South Beach.
New England, which lost four of its final nine games of the regular season, heads to Wild Card Weekend – something that was not only an extremely unlikely scenario during the Patriots’ 8-0 start to the regular season, but nearly as unlikely just prior to kickoff of Week 17 with the home team favored by more than 16 points – a beaten team in so many ways.
A snarky critic might say the latest Dolphins’ upset of the Patriots was no Miami Miracle but more of a Gillette Gag Job.
It also just may be the worst loss in the history of Gillette Stadium.
The 33-14 playoff beatdown by Baltimore back in the 2009 postseason you say? At least that defeat was at the hands of an actual playoff team and came shortly after seeing offensive centerpiece Wes Welker go down with a torn ACL in the season finale.
The 2010 postseason loss to Rex Ryan and the rest of the loudmouth Jets? It’s up there.
The 2008 loss to Eric Mangini’s Jets? Personal rivalries boost that candidate.
But this loss, one to a Dolphins team with inferior talent after tearing things down to rebuild, might just be the worst.
It cost a fledgling Patriots squad the ever-important bye.
It came with the supposed elite “Boogeymen” defense on the field protecting a four-point lead with less than four minutes to play and 75 yards at their back.
The strength of the team got undressed and embarrassed by an aging Harvard man and his Fitzmagic
“They attacked everything. We didn’t get a stop,” safety Devin McCourty said in his postgame press conference. ”I’ve come up here and said numerous times that’s what we want, a chance to play defense to end the game and we didn’t get it done today. It wasn’t like they attacked one thing, spread the ball around, we didn’t get any stops that we needed. When you don’t do that on the last drive of the game and you let the team drive the field and score, that’s what you get. For us, we still should be confident to go out there, we just know we’ve got to execute. Today, we didn’t execute really any situations out there, especially the last drive. We always talk about that, no matter how you played throughout the game, we took the field and had a chance to win a football game in a two-minute drive and we didn’t get it done.”
Maybe worst of all is that Belichick challenged his team this week. Called it a playoff game.
What happens when you lose a real playoff game? Your season is over.
While New England’s season isn’t technically over, it is certainly on life support. A ninth straight trip to the AFC title game is the least of considerations. The Super Bowl is a dreamy mirage a long ways off in the distance.
Right now it’s about rebounding from an unlikely butt-whooping at the hands an inferior rival. It’s about licking your wounds and recovering. It’s about finding a way to take advantage of the opportunity that still very much remains on the horizon, even if it doesn’t quite feel like there is much of a point at this point.
Longtime leader and team captain Matthew Slater acknowledged the Patriots may have had “a little lack of focus or lack of execution” closing out the loss to Miami. But none of that matters now. It now really is a one-game – a real playoff game -- season.
“Here in New England we’ve been a little bit spoiled with byes yearly,” Slater said of New England heading toward its first Wild Card game since 2009. “We’re blessed to be in the playoffs. We need to make this opportunity count.
“Certainly it is a different situation, but it is important for us to have the proper perspective. We have been very blessed to have the type of season we have had and being in the playoffs. A lot of teams don’t get that opportunity. Would it have been nice to have the bye? But now we don’t have one. We have to do everything in our power to recover and prepare and be excited about our opportunity. Let’s not mope around and feel sorry for ourselves, we are in the playoffs. Our team has worked hard and we should be appreciative of where we are.”
With barely a week to recover and prepare for the arrival of an upstart opponent, New England is continuing to search for answers on offense and suddenly not looking quite so stout on defense, having been pushed around at various points over the last three weeks by the not-so-mighty Dolphins, Bills and Bengals.
Brady may have summed it up best with his simple assessment when asked for his feelings about the loss sending the Patriots to the Wild Card game for the first time in a decade.
“We didn’t play the way we’re capable of playing and it ended up costing us. Just too many bad mistakes,” Brady said.
That’s true. While the Patriots didn’t play the way they are capable of, New England did play the way it has plenty of times this season. The offense sputtered. The defense faded as it did with increased competition over the second half of the season.
Now it’s a four-game trek to a potential record seventh Lombardi Trophy.
It’s a road New England has never taken to a Super Bowl ring.
But even after the worst loss of the season and maybe in the history of Gillette Stadium, it’s a chance that the players in the home locker room plan to try to take full advantage of.
Regardless of how unlikely a Super Bowl run may now seem from the outside looking in.
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