As second looks go, this didn’t get any less ugly after digesting it and rewatching it again Sunday evening. The Patriots played… and looked exactly like a team that had a single practice in the last two weeks.
But there are no excuses for what we saw on the field at Gillette, and the team should be glad that there weren’t fans in the stadium for that one. It was among the ugliest games in the Bill Belichick era. And against a team that isn’t very good.
Denver isn’t a good football team. Prior to their steamrolling of the Patriots on Sunday, their only prior win was against a terrible J-E-T-S team that helped them along by committing a slew of personal foul penalties on defense in that one.