If you have yet to see the entire two-part Bill Belichick A Football Life, stop reading and watch it above immediately. Or for the purposes of this post you can just click play and it will queue right up to maybe the most infamous loss of the Belichick era thanks to NFL Films’ documenting it from the inside.
I am of course talking about the 2009 loss to the Saints in New Orleans by a glaring 38-17 score. The most famous part of this loss was recorded by the cameras as Belichick lamented not being able to get the 2009 team to play the way they needed to, that it had nothing really to do with the Saints and was mostly on the Patriots’ inability to overcome any adversity.
Eight years later we have a good perspective on the 2009 season now and I thought it would be a fun little look back at a terrible game that came in maybe the worst season under Belichick.
The Patriots gave up a whopping eight plays of 20 or more yards in this one, including passes of 75 (TD), 68, 38 (TD), 33, and 20 (TD). Yes it was an all-day aerial assault from the Saints when they were primed to win the Super Bowl that season. Meanwhile the Patriots were realizing in late-November just how flawed their team was.
2009 was Tom Brady‘s first year back from ACL surgery and despite a rocky start in the opener it was still statistically another very solid year for Brady with Pro Football Reference ranking his value that season as the fifth-best season of his career.
Defensively the Patriots didn’t even stink on paper.They were 14th overall in DVOA, not great, but still not as bad as you might expect from took place against the Saints. Overall the defense was 5th in points allowed.
What I think went wrong for the 2009 Pats was that they were really a team of transition. There were the offensive remnants of the 2007 season with Moss and Welker, but outside of those two threats there wasn’t much else scary about the offense. As Belichick pointed out to his staff, “get up on Welker, take away Moss deep and we’re done.”
Defensively, they were now without Rodney Harrison, Mike Vrabel and Tedy Bruschi, while Richard Seymour was shipped to Oakland just before the season started. Instead new contributors like Gary Guyton, Jonathan Wilhite, Tully Banta-Cain and Brandon McGowan were relied on.
It wasn’t all that surprising to see the Pats completely meltdown in their first playoff game against the Ravens that season. The early and often adversity in that game was the exact recipe for disaster and in hindsight it’s even more clear that blowout loss was coming.
This was the mid-era dip for Belichick, an inevitable time when things turned over from the dynasty days and had to be rebuilt from scratch. While it was happening this was a huge point of interest for me to start blogging about the team. How would Belichick do it with total control? Could he formulate a team around Brady to get him more titles?
Of course now we now he could. But it was a process that went through multiple versions. Things didn’t get much better on defense in 2010, despite worse statistics they were at least a team that seemed to play the way Belichick wanted, preying on takeaways to make up for thousands of yards surrendered. I guess the transition would be best summed up by Adalius Thomas falling into the doghouse while Rob Ninkovich ascended.
That was the start of the new defense that would deliver two more Super Bowls.
By Week 12 of the 2009 season Belichick had a good idea of what his team was — bad. But here in Week 2 of 2017, Sunday’s game is still very much an unknown. It’s hard not to look at the explosive plays of 20-plus yards against Drew Brees over the last two meetings, eight in 2009 and five in 2013, and compare them to the explosive plays that happened in the opener against the Chiefs. We’re all wondering if this defense could get just as lit up as this 2009 did.
But at the same time this is far from a leaderless, transitional Patriots team. The offense is not stuck thinking they can do things they did two seasons ago, they’re trying to evolve into something new, both by choice and because of injuries. While the defense does have their transitional issues up front, their secondary is as talented and battle-hardened as they’ve ever been and that’s where the team must lean on, especially in this matchup.
We’ll learn a lot about this Patriots team on Sunday. It’s a stiff test coming on the heels of a historic loss, which makes it both exciting and terrifying. Games like this are what make the regular season fun. Hold on, it should be a back-and-forth affair.
