Those were the words of Tom Brady on WEEI’s Dennis & Callahan Show on Tuesday morning, defending the decision of head coach Bill Belichick to go for a first down deep in the Patriots’ own territory.
“Listen, we lost the game, and I understand the blame’s got to be placed somewhere, and everyone always wants to point the finger and say this is the one reason why we lost,” Brady said. “The reality is there’s a lot of reasons why we lost that game. We [went 3-for-6] in the red area, we had some real critical turnovers, we had some opportunities to get the ball in the end zone. We had an opportunity to run the clock out at the end of the game and we didn’t. We as players are responsible for that.
“I wish we would have done a better job executing those last couple of plays or else we’d be talking about how great of a win it was.”
(So, too, does the rest of New England.)
Brady said that he disagrees with the media’s assessment that Belichick should have put the blame on his own shoulders in the coach’s postgame news conference, and also disputed former Patriot Tedy Bruschi‘s assessment that Belichick’s call sent a message to the defense.
“The same thing happened in the AFC championship game in 2006,” Brady said. “We had a third-and-4 [at the New England 46], we missed it, we punted to them, and they went down the field in less than two minutes to score again. And Tedy was on that field that day. You can argue it a lot of ways. Had we punted the ball [on Sunday] and the [Colts] returned it to the 50-yard line, then what do you say?”
Brady did not want to spend too much time on the past, instead laying out the plans for what the Patriots need to do to be in good position in January.
“We’ve got seven games left. It’s really going to be determined what kind of team we are these last seven games,” he said. “I think we made a lot of improvement since the first couple of weeks of the season. For a team that’s now 9-0 that we played, I think we see where we measure up. I don’t think I’m concerned with what we’re capable of as a football team. It’s just more of how we’ve got to out and play these next seven games.”
