The New England Patriots lost in dramatic fashion on Sunday afternoon after climbing back from a 17-3 halftime deficit. With the ball on their own 45-yard line in a tie game, the Patriots ran a draw play with three seconds left and seemed content with going to overtime.
After Rhamondre Stevenson got the ball upfield a bit, he lateralled it to Jakobi Meyers, who then tried to lateral it all the way back to Mac Jones. That’s when disaster struck. Chandler Jones intercepted the lateral and ran over the quarterback on his way to a game-winning touchdown with no time left on the clock.
Andy Hart and Khari Thompson talked about the Patriots’ ending and sloppy play overall on the Audacy Original Podcast “6 Rings and Football Things”.
“That was an ugly a– football game, Khari, especially the first half. You did your best to climb out of the hole but in the first half that is one of the more sloppy football games you will ever see from the New England Patriots in the Bill Belichick era,” Hart said (2:41 in player above). “They sucked, in my opinion, in all three phases. It was inverse-complementary football, whatever the hell you want to call it. It was a suckfest on offense – excuse me, suckfest on offense for everybody not named Rhamondre Stevenson –, suckfest on defense, and suckfest in the kicking game with a blocked punt.
“That was an embarrassing performance that they had a chance to win, and then I think probably appropriately they gave it away in the end because they probably didn’t deserve to win the game, although … not sure the Raiders deserved to win that game either.”
The first half was indeed pretty ugly. The Patriots put up just three points as they trailed 17-3 at halftime in Las Vegas after that blocked punt in the final minute of the half.
“They didn’t do a whole lot better last week,” Thompson said. “That’s the thing about it. They were terrible against the Cardinals in the first half. They looked like they had no interest in winning that football game.”
Last week was more of the same in the first half. They managed to score 10 points, all in the second quarter, but the Cardinals could’ve done more damage than the 13 points they put up.
The Patriots followed that same script this week.
“Then they come out and basically come out flat once again in the first half, they climb back into it in the second half, take the lead late, you’re just like, ‘Look, there it is. They’re a second-half team and they just make the plays when they need to make them,’” Thompson continued.
“Then you have the touchdown that stood that a lot of us think probably shouldn’t have stood, but probably wasn’t clear and definitive enough to overturn because the camera angles are terrible, but the lasting image of this game is going to be Chandler Jones turning Mac Jones into a chalk outline at around the 40-yeard line and running that all the way back. I still just don’t even know how to process what in the world just happened right there.”
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