Expectations based. There were 2 match-ups. Of those, the Patriots offense did as well as expected, given they put up 33 and if not for snapper then kicker error they’d have put up 37. The Eagles offense over-performed expectations. By how much? Taking out the last 3 points because those came at the end after the strip of Tom Brady, they gave up 10-12 points more than the high-end of my expectations. I could have seen a 36 to 33 Patriots win, meaning both offenses perform well but the Eagles are at the high end of my expectations. To me, scoring 38, really 39 because they also blew a kick, means the defense actively played worse than they should have versus that offense playing well. Is the difference Philly being that much better than my beliefs? I’d say the answer is yes, but I’d also say the difference is NE didn’t coach well. And I’ll be blunt: they were not well coached all year. Through the first 4 games, they gave up about 32 points a game, which is terrible. They developed into a decent bend not break defense but they would regress – like against Miami – instead of showing constant improvement. By contrast, the offensive side for NE fought through large losses – nearly all units in the NFL suffer large losses during a year – and succeeded. It often wasn’t pretty: the offense and the team seemed to wait until the need to turn it on jump-started them. Now I’m honing in on the meaning of my comment about the quality of coaching: they never had control of this team and in the Super Bowl they were unable to get their guys to focus properly. That answer lies at the end of the long thread that has as its complementary opposite the thread that says the Eagles were better physically not mentally and the Patriots lost only because of a lack of talent on defense. I would say there is an element of truth in that as well, but those take me to 2, Outcome based.
Outcome based. Were the Eagles better physically? Assuming all play calls, with ordinary exceptions, were correct enough, both offensive and defensive, then to fully isolate the physical I’d have to remove all mental focus issues. That’s where I run into a problem: I know from experience that it’s rare to have two sides evenly matched physically and yet this is the NFL where players for each position fit a series of definitions and experiential thread that limits the pool in the direction of best fit across a number of dimensions, and that increases the odds of physical even-ness. The Eagles won a lot of games, but the Patriots won as many so there’s no obvious physical difference in the season. If the Patriots had smarter but weaker players, that might show up but that would assume a physical superiority equal to the mental superiority in the other. That would suggest the Eagles were a bit better physically AND at least near equal mentally. Or it would suggest they were equal physically AND the Eagles were sharper mentally … which goes back to coaching. I think it was closer to that. I’ve seen Jay Ajayi and LeGarette Blount play many times, including the latter for the Patriots. Neither is as smooth as they looked in that game. The Patriots looked to me to be a beat behind mentally, meaning they overplayed or underplayed in both positioning and reactions because they weren’t focused properly on the act of playing. That speaks to the sense of them not being ‘well coached’ this entire year, whether that’s the coaching staff’s fault or was an issue with the players. I don’t know that
[And now there are stories that Malcolm Butler was benched for reasons other than his bad play. He was bad this year. He’d shown signs of risk taking beyond his capabilities earlier – wants to be Darrelle Revis, I think – but this year he was constantly caught out by receivers looking into the backfield or faking a move. He’d look back for the ball and the receiver would separate or he’d move on the fake and get deked on the route. Always seemed to be trying to make a big play. Not sure if that was because of his contract issues – wanting to raise his profile – or if he believed he could do that better than it showed or if his contract issues made him less good at it. I tend to think offenses read his tendencies and learned how to deke him and he kept ‘error repeating’. I assumed he was benched because of that, but there may be more to it. In any event, the defense was consistently a beat off, either under or over reacting.]
jomi: playing with perception 