Pats-Broncos

You can definitely say the Patriots deserved a better fate on Saturday night, as they outplayed Denver through the heart of the game. But New England was long overdue for having a game where things went bad: bad calls, bad turnovers, bad breaks on inconclusive replays, a missed field goal and even a little bad luck. This happens to every team. It happened to Montana and the Niners, who I saw lose 49-3 one playoff afternoon. It happened to that great Steelers team in Oakland one year when they got thumped by 20 points in the championship game.

Brady didn't play badly. He did force some throws and was off target on some others that were makeable. But he was under a lot of pressure all night with those aggressive Denver blitzes. The throw that Champ Bailey picked off was a terrible decision and that really was the game right there. New England was set to at least cut the deficit to one point, but Brady just didn't want to settle for another field goal and forced the issue.

Did Denver show enough to make anyone think they can go into Indy and beat the Colts? No. If they try that blitzing stuff against Manning, they're dead. And Jake Plummer was disappointing, quite frankly, and will have to play markedly better under much more difficult conditions on the road in a disruptively loud dome.

Before signing off until tomorrow, I have to note the story on the pre-game show where Boomer Esiason, who would know, said that the rumors that Chad Johsnon threw punches at Marvin Lewis at halftime last week in the loss to Pittsburgh are true. Wow. That's explosive stuff. If Boomer has good info (and why would he volunteer that on national TV if he didn't), Johnson has to go because there's really no turning back from that.

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