The New England Patriots have spent much of this season looking distinctly un-Patriot-like. They’ve lost to good teams, struggled to move the ball and, in the strangest twist, Tom Brady has actually looked his age. (He’s 42, which is a very normal age for adult humans and a very abnormal age for adult humans playing quarterback in the NFL.)
But the long-term implications of those issues were easy to ignore because they were still 12-3 going into the final Sunday of the season. All they had to do was beat the lowly Miami Dolphins to clinch a first-round bye in the playoffs.
The problem was that there was one quarterback on the field at Gillette Stadium who played like he was capable of leading a team on a long playoff run. The other quarterback was Tom Brady.
In a twist that was as stunning as it was telling, the Patriots lost to Ryan Fitzpatrick and the Dolphins 27-24 on the final day of the regular season. That means when the playoffs begin next weekend there will be an unusual sight: the Patriots having to play on wild-card weekend. The loss dropped them to the No. 3 seed in the AFC, setting up a matchup with the sixth-seeded Tennessee Titans.
The San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers earned byes in the NFC. The Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs did in the AFC. The Patriots didn’t because they couldn’t beat the Dolphins.
“I certainly didn’t do a good enough job,” Brady said afterward. “We’ve got to do better next week.”
Brady isn’t used to thinking about the week after Week 17. The Patriots have so consistently made sustained runs in the playoffs in large part because they’ve played well enough in the regular season to avoid this exact result. They’ve played in three times as many Super Bowls (nine) than they have wild-card games (three) in the Brady era. The last time was 2009.
Missing out on the bye has a dual effect. They have to play one more game in order to reach the Super Bowl, and even if they win, they’ll have to play on the road in the divisional round in Kansas City.
They’ve already lost to Kansas City this season, and all of New England’s first three defeats felt like referendums. They lost to the Ravens, Houston Texans and the Chiefs. When Brady was outplayed by Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes, respectively, each seemed to signal an irreversible generational shift that the Patriots were, at best, trying to postpone for another year.
Sunday’s loss held a different sort of message. Baltimore, Houston and Kansas City won their respective divisions. Mahomes is the reigning MVP, Jackson is a shoo-in to win this year and Watson isn’t especially far behind either of them. Meanwhile, the Dolphins spent the last year trading away their best players in a transparent concession that they weren’t especially concerned with winning football games in 2019.
The loss was jarring because New England had never experienced anything like this during its two decades of dominance. It was favored to beat Miami by two touchdowns, and during Bill Belichick’s time as head coach, the Patriots had never lost a game when they were favored by at least 14 points. Until Sunday.
But the concerning part for the reigning Super Bowl champions was that the loss didn’t seem like an aberration. When the Dolphins beat the Patriots a year ago, it ended on such a fluky play that it was immediately dubbed “The Miami Miracle.” This time the tables were turned, and New England was the team desperately trying to lateral the ball at the last second. But instead of ending up in the end zone, the play sputtered in a microcosm of what the Patriots offense has looked like for much of the season.
Brady finished the game 16-for-29 for 221 yards, with two touchdowns and one interception—a costly pick-six. On the other side of the field, Fitzpatrick threw for 320 yards with one touchdown and zero interceptions. Brady was outplayed by a guy who’s more famous for his beard and attending Harvard than winning football games.
By any objective metric, Brady has played poorly this season. His 6.6 yards per attempt rank 27th in the league out of 32 qualifying quarterbacks. And those numbers have gotten worse over the course of the season: he’s averaging just 5.9 yards per attempt since the start of November.
There are plenty of explanations for this. The offensive line hasn’t been as steady as it once was, and Brady is dealing with a bare cupboard of weapons that they’ve tried, with little success, to replenish since Rob Gronkowski’s retirement. The last time they played Miami, in the season’s second week, it was the one game Antonio Brown played for New England before he was released. Since then, first-round pick N’Keal Harry hasn’t broken through after beginning the season injured, while midseason trade acquisition Mohamed Sanu hasn’t changed the paradigm either.
Then there’s Brady, who has started the most NFL ever games at quarterback as a 42-year-old. But the same instincts that allowed him to play at an elite level for so long—playing carefully and avoiding hits—may now be playing a role in his demise: Brady leads the league in throwing the ball away.
Brady’s woes didn’t come out of nowhere. His yards per attempt have dipped every year since 2015, and his numbers were middling a year ago. But it was easy to forget about that. He outdueled Patrick Mahomes in the AFC Championship last year, and a couple of weeks later it didn’t matter so much when the New England offense scored only one touchdown.
That’s because the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3 in Super Bowl LIII, and Brady needed a second hand to fit his sixth Super Bowl ring.
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Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
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2019-12-30 13:10:00Z
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