Obviously, everyone knows by now that if Drake Maye had just taken care of and checked down the football, we'd be talking about a 1-0 Patriots team off a hard-fought victory over the defending Super Bowl champions at Lumen Field.
We'll never know how things would have played out if Drew Lock hadn't had to replace Sam Darnold, but the result was largely the same as the Super Bowl: the defense played well enough to win; the offense did not.
I don't have a lot of notes on how the defense performed. The run defense was a little leaky, but I do think part of that was a good Seahawks interior line (their tackles were very suspect) like in the Super Bowl, and tight end A.J. Barner and fullback Brady Russell WAY outperformed their Patriots counterparts (Eli Raridon, Reggie Gilliam) as far as blocking goes. If you swapped those two positions, the Patriots might have survived Maye's meltdown and won the game. The Seahawks, at least after one game, are the far more physical football team. We'll see if the Patriots can improve in that area as the season goes along. The way they constructed the roster, they're counting on it.
But these were the headlines, positive and negative, from the defense before we get into film analysis, positional ratings, and three up/down:
• I thought the Patriots, both offensively and defensively, were out of gas in the fourth quarter and that contributed to the defeat. I think that's why you saw the penalty issues arise in the second half, especially on offense. I'm more concerned that the defense, which played 19 fewer snaps than the offense, seemed to wear down faster. That was part of the issues on the Jaxon Smith-Njigba touchdown, as you would take issue with the pursuit effort of a few players, including