Posted by Teddy Panos, Sun Staff
Final Score
Bills 7
Patriots 38
View from Mt. Olympus: Yawn! Ho-hum! Another day at the office!
Bring on the Colts. Let’s play a best of seven series, winner take all. Let the rest of the teams play out the schedule, minus the Patriots and Colts matchups, so everyone can make their money and give fans something to do. But I think at this point we all know the Super Bowl winner is going to be one of these two teams. So why mess around. Let’s get it on!
Seriously, this has been ridiculously easy. The Pats have scored 38-points in every game, but this week, the defense decided to change things up by holding Buffalo to seven, instead of the fourteen surrendered to the Jets and Chargers. It’s tough to find any negatives right now (though I think I have one…LOL!) and the positives are getting positively redundant.
OK, the negative; I’m beginning to wonder if Bill Belichick has lost faith in Stephen Gostkowski. Why else would the Pats go for it on 4th and 7, when clearly in field goal range? And it’s not like it would have been a 50-yarder or anything. The coach likes to say if you don’t have faith in your kicker, he shouldn’t be on the team. Well, what’s going to happen when the time comes (and you know it’s going to despite the recent blowouts) when a game comes down to a field goal situation and you won’t even try one in an early season game that turns into a blowout?
Now that I’ve written that, I have to say that if that’s the only thing to worry about right now, the Patriots are in darn good shape.
Shining Stars: As Yogi Berra once said; it’s déjà vu all over again.
3-games…a third star on the forehead for Tom Brady (23-29, 311-yards, 4-TD’s & 0-Int’s), Randy Moss (5-115, 2-TD’s), Wes Welker (6-69, plus provided the spark when the Pats were sleepwalking early) and the Offensive Line (only 1-sack allowed and big holes for the running backs). If this paragraph sounds familiar, it should. The same folks have earned honors in the previous two games.
However, this week we’re going to belatedly move Ben Watson to the front of the class for catching a TD pass in a 3rd consecutive game and Laurence Maroney for breaking the hundred yard barrier on only 19-carries (19-103 to be exact).
On the other side of the ball, it was another great team effort. Adalius Thomas led the way with 7-tackles, so he gets extra credit, as does Ellis Hobbs for a key early game sack/forced fumble and a pretty nice play to break up a long pass later in the contest. And finally, how about a career-achievement award to Junior Seau, who moved into second place on the all-time list for games played by a linebacker with 244. He passed BC Bill Romanowski, and now trails only Clay Matthews, who appeared in 278-games. Doubt Junior will top that mark, but you never know. The physical freak of nature puts a lot of younger guys to shame.
Quality Quote: "Nope. I haven’t overthrown him yet."--Tom Brady, when asked if he thought he'd overthrown Moss on the long touchdown
"I don’t think that was the best play that I’ve ever seen; let’s put it that way. When the players have the ball out there, they have to make the plays and it’s their job to do what they think is best. Being aggressive and trying to make plays is good. Being careless and not taking care of the ball is bad. I’ll talk to Wes about it and see exactly what he saw. I don’t think we want to make a habit of that. In that case, it worked out for a few extra yards. It’s hard to get on him, but we’ll try. We’ll get on him anyway."—Bill Belichick when asked what he thought about Welker’s lateral to Moss.
See. The coach has a much easier time coming up with negatives than I do!
That’s the view from Mt. Olympus…how do you see it? I’m half-joking about the Pats-Colts best-of-seven thing, but admit it; it would be awesome, wouldn’t it?