kenny moore II
 

interesting article on KM and tidbits about the patriots way.

glad he found his way to IND!

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...-with-patriots

It will be interesting to see if the patriot way is still effective with brady gone.

o


Some have argued that Bill Belichick's best and most impressive season ever as a head coach was in 2008, when the Patriots went 11-5 with Matt Cassel at quarterback.



The 2008 Patriots Will Forever be Bill Belichick’s True Masterpiece

(By Michael Seff)

http://draftamerica.com/the-2008-pat...e-masterpiece/

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They can say that all they want. But those 2008 Patriots did miss the playoffs.

o

And there have been many 8-8 teams and even some 7-9 teams that have made the playoffs, due to being in a shitty division.

Since 1978, the only two 11-5 teams ever to not to make the playoffs have been the 1985 Denver Broncos and the 2008 Patriots. If you're arguing that the luck of the draw which will often allow an 8-8 team to make the playoffs is more impressive than an extremely unlucky 11-5 team not making the playoffs, that's rather absurd. Going 11-5 with Matt Cassel as your starting quarterback is a hell of a lot more impressive than an 8-8 team or a 7-9 team sneaking into the playoffs. If that 2008 Patriots team had gone 8-8 and won their division, it would have been viewed much more as the Patriots desperately missing Brady than the fact that they went 11-5 without him. The 2020 Colts would have been the 3rd team ever to miss the playoffs with their 11-5 record, but there was an additional/7th seed added this year. I don't know anybody who would argue that the 7-9 Redskins deserved a playoff berth more and/or were a more accomplished team than the 11-5 Colts were, regardless of whether or not that 7th seed had been added.

o

I hate Belicheat as much as the next guy, but the reason they missed the playoffs that year was due to the NFL's shitty playoff rules and seeding that rewards teams for playing in a crap division. 7 and 8 win teams shouldn't be making the playoffs over 10+ win teams nor should they be hosting playoff games against teams with much better records.

I say that primarily because winning 6 Super Bowls will always be a greater coaching accomplishment than an 11-5 season that didn't make the playoffs.

That, plus fuck the Patriots and Belichick.

But looking even more closely at that season, let's see who those 11 wins came against.

Four of those wins came against the teams in a division where a 9-7 team ran away with it. The NFC West was easily the worst division if the league that year.

Unless you want to count the AFC West, who' division champ was the 8-8 Chargers, who actually beat the Patriots that year. By 20 points. Of course three other NE wins came against the other three in that division.

That makes seven wins against the teams from the embarrassingly inept divisions in the league. The other four came against the 7-9 Bills (two of the wins), the 9-7 Jets, and the eventual division champion Dolphins who ended up 11-5.

That means they won three games against teams with winning records, and two of those teams had 9-7 records. The cumulative record of their opponents was 96 - 112. Hardly Murderer's Row. And yeah, no Brady, but as many have brought up over the years, the Patriots of that era were a complete team, not a top-heavy, unbalanced mix whose HoF QB had to drag to victory week after week.

Was it a good coaching job to go 11-5 with Cassell? Sure. But anyone who thinks it was best coaching job ever by a six-time SB winning coach shouldn't be taken seriously (and to be fair, you never said this, you just mentioned that some have argued this).

And yeah, I'm super bored this Sunday morning.

o

I took them seriously, and I agree with them. Your point is taken in regard to the 2008 Patriots' relatively weak schedule, but bad teams (and even average teams) don't go 11-5 in the NFL, regardless of how strong/weak their schedule is. As someone once said, there are no Miami of Ohio's in the NFL. To the other extreme, the Colts went 2-14 without Peyton Manning in 2011, and came back and went 11-5 the following season with Andrew Luck behind center. That was a quintessential example of a team that was heavily quarterback-dependent. When Brady came back the following season in 2010, the Patriots went 10-6. They were a quintessential example of a complete team.

o

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That's what really still stings me about what happened to the Colts in 2008. They went 12-4, AND they beat the Chargers on their home-field in San Diego ...... but the Colts still had to go on the road in the post-season because those 8-8 Chargers won their division. They wound up losing in overtime at Jack Murphy Stadium.

2 things about that 2008 Colts team really stood out to me ...... one, they were hot as a pistol over the final 2 and-a-half months of that season. They started the season at 3-4 while Manning's knee was still recovering from surgery in July. As Manning's knee began to feel better, the Colts ran off 9 straight wins to close out the season. The other thing is that they beat the eventual Super Bowl champion Steelers in Pittsburgh during that 9-game winning streak. I felt that the Colts were the only AFC team that truly had a chance to beat the Steelers that post-season. Unfortunately, we never got to see that match-up because of their loss to the 8-8 Chargers in San Diego.

o

Rather long but nice article on Kenny Moore ... :cool:

https://www.golongtd.com/p/you-cant-break-kenny-moore