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This was Sutton's worst performance to date. Up to this point I've defended a lot of what he's done, but last night's effort gave me no grounds to do so.
The Chiefs have as much defensive talent on the field as the Patriots do but the Patriots were able to get to Mahomes a lot more often and it was only Mahomes' ability to work outside the pocket that saved him.
Granted, the 'exotic' blitzes they used on Mahomes wouldn't work on Brady because he's unlikely to get tricked by most of those disguises. And blitzing Brady is generally a bad idea given his ability to diagnose and hit the hot.
But we were completely vanilla yesterday with no wrinkles that even made Brady think twice. I won't blame Sutton for the ILB's refusal to do some fairly basic run-fit stuff, but he's absolutely responsible for the plain coverage looks that gave Brady very easy reads. Especially when we know how badly Brady wanted to work over the middle and we still did very little to address it.
Last night was an unacceptable effort from Sutton and I can't think of anything else to call it. I don't think that has been his norm thus far this season, but he got pretty badly de-pantsed by Belichick.
We weren't gonna hold NE to 17, but 31 was within reason and we got nothing approaching that.
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"If there's a god, he's laughing at us.....and our football team..."
"When you look at something through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags."
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