Posted on 02/06/2018 9:29:18 AM PST by C19fan
Bill Belichick reportedly made the decision to bench Malcolm Butler after the cornerback struggled in practice and committed a serious rules infraction while in Minneapolis. NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reports that Butler was already questionable after he struggled during practice all week. Not helping his lackluster performance on the field was the fact that Butler had twice been admitted to the hospital in the days before the team traveled to Minnesota with flu-like symptoms.
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Belichick was just celebrating Black History month in his own unique style.
That idiot Collinsworth kept panning the camera to him.
Only reason anyone knows who this guy is, is because of the worst stupid bowl call in history. Great call, Pete Carroll!
LT would smoke crack before the game!
The Patriots (whose name is a trigger to British people) will be hectored out of existence.
Much as I hate Colinsworth he’s not the producer or the director he doesn’t pan the camera to anything.
Bench a player for curfew violations in the biggest game of the year - Al Davis is rolling over in his grave. The whole point of enforcing discipline is to make sure the team does everything it can to win the championship. Enforcing discipline for its own sake at the cost of a championship is...lots of things, none of them positive.
there were a lot of bad calls on that play, starting with the play call. I’m still waiting for them to throw a flag on Brandon Browned for holding Jermaine Kearse to keep him from picking off Butler. He nearly pulled his jersey off!
But still they should have gave to Lynch to pound it in.
Even if he'd have played, it wouldn't have mattered - Goodell and the NFL didn't want the Pats to win; EVERY close play that went to replay came back in favor of Philly - including their last TD, which would've been ruled incomplete any other time.
If there is anything like a bright side to this whole loss, its the comments that the refs called touchdowns against Brady.
Butler need only succeed on one play to change that game. Brady did all he could possibly do.
The fact that the Pats defense looked like it did the first week of the season was enough for any die hard Pats fan give up hope some time in the 3rd quarter.
Tommy didn’t get a Tuck You call
Allowing players to violate team rules is...lots of things, none of them positive......You don't tell your coach screw you, I'm staying out late, when he sets a curfew......
As I understand it, he had a woman in his hotel room after curfew and was busted smoking weed.
Right. So what if Butler is a step slow because he didn't sleep enough, or because he's hungover, or because he's suffering flu like symptoms? It's not like Foles was going to burn anyone with his accuracy, or with the size and speed of his receivers.
I saw a catch, two steps, and then the ball break the plane of the goal line. Only the most biased homer would see that as anything other than a touchdown. Collinsworth is a self-righteous horses ass who offers opinion as fact, and who spent most of the game removing his feet from his mouth.
OK Pats fans all need to STFU on the calls. For one thing the only calls I saw that were blatantly wrong were FOR the Pats. But more importantly for the last 17 freaking years, from the Tuck Rule through the no penalties against the Jags in the AFC Championship the call all go for NE. Finally, once, the calls go against NE, suck it up. If Goodell was gonna F the Pats over it would have been last year when Brady served his suspension, or even 2 years before when Deflategate started, not now. There was no conspiracy, it was just the law of averages finally catching up to the Pats, eventually you guys weren’t going to get the calls.
And meanwhile, if Bill had freaking played Butler you probably win even with the calls going against you. I understand wanting to punish guys who break the rules, but practicing him all week only to tell him walking out of the tunnel he’s out damaged the team. They didn’t practice with the personnel they played with, they lost one of the mains guys to the defense, and seriously downgraded the skill at that position. Bill picked the discipline hill to die on, and he did.
The biggest problem is how defense works. The offense throws a lot of weird looks at a defense trying to get them to miss their assignments, a lot of how defenses avoid missing their assignments is knowing what the other guys are going to do. Butler took 98% of the team’s snaps during everybody on the defense knew what he was going to do, take him out, move one guy out of position to cover him and then bring in another out of position guy to back fill that and everybody loses a bit of confidence (which in the NFL is expressed with speed) in what the other guys are doing and what they should.
An Eagles coach has leaked that they completely changed the game plan when they realized Butler was out, because they knew that side of the field was now covered by lesser talent (including a guy they traded to the Pats for a 4th round pick) playing out of position. No matter how you slice it they’d have been better off with Butler.
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