Everything you need to know from the Patriots’ 13-10 loss to the Seahawks in quickie form, with BSJ insight and analysis:
HEADLINES
Well, that was a blown opportunity. No way to sugarcoat it. The Patriots had the Seahawks on the ropes in Seattle. They were up 10 points in the third quarter against the defending Super Bowl champs, who were forced to play without their leader, Sam Darnold after he was hurt on the opening series of the game. And yet the man who finished runner-up as the NFL MVP a season ago, Drake Maye, imploded, and the rest of the team went down in flames with him.
"We can't turn the ball over, and we have to create more turnovers," Mike Vrabel said postgame. "Again, it's a broken record, but we gotta have a chance. We gotta be great in that situation."
I had no idea that the teams could flip quarterbacks in the final quarter (must be some rule I’m unaware of). Maye morphed into the mediocre Drew Lock - throwing three terrible interceptions to change the tenor of the game and ice it, for the other guys. Meanwhile, Lock looked poised, managing the game well with both his arms (45-yard TD) and his legs (key scramble on the go-ahead drive). What in the heck did we just watch?
The Pats' offensive approach was perhaps more conservative than you’d like, with Maye coming off the season he was - how many times are you going to run into a brick wall? - but there was a reason for that: Vrabel didn’t want to see Maye and the offense in the type of situations they were in the Super Bowl, where too many second-and-third and longs opened them up to the pressure packages that help define Mike Macdonald’s defense.