Week 2018: Brady and Belichick pass the ruler

It’s already a tradition: every year, taking advantage of the quietness of the offseason, we do a special week, remembering an NFL season. For this year, we decided to tell the story of the 2018 season, full of good characters and captivating stories. We saw the emergence of a star, a coach becoming established, the last dance of a famous duo and much more. Come with us on this delicious journey through time!

Excellence is built with time, consistency and hard work, and in the last two decades, the New England Patriots have shown this best in the NFL. There were an incredible nine Super Bowl appearances for Tom Brady & Bill Belichick while they were together, resulting in six titles and the consolidation of the Do Your Job method of work – basically, if you do your job well, you don’t have to worry about your teammate. The important thing is to keep working.

Maybe the 2018 season was the last time we saw that motto working perfectly in New England, because frankly, that team wasn’t as strong as the one that won Super Bowls in 2014 and 2016. he could doubt the Brady-Belichick duo; the thing is, other than that, there were a few reasons you could think of superior teams making the playoffs.

The regular season’s 11-5 was a good reflection of what we saw from September through December. The team lost games allowing four touchdowns to Blake Bortles (Jaguars, Week 2), lost games where it was completely dominated (Titans, Week 10), and lost games so unbelievably that the game even got its own name (Dolphins, Week 14). . In fact, that was the first year since 2009 that New England lost five regular season games. The break in the Wild Card only happened because of the tiebreakers.

And? Nobody wins the Super Bowl in December.

Hierarchy

Okay, it wasn’t the best regular season in the world there, but the break was guaranteed anyway – and that break was always worth a lot to Tom Brady’s arm, who was already 41 there. First came the Los Angeles Chargers – who even had a superior campaign (12-4) in the regular season, but could not be anything more than a wild card because the Kansas City Chiefs were the ones who won the division with the same 12-4.

The thing about the 2018 Patriots is that they weren’t explosive or brilliant, but they were consistently efficient in everything they did. Don’t be fooled by the final score of 41-28 in that game: the Chargers were completely dominated from start to finish. New England controlled in all facets of the game, especially with Sony Michel playing a vital role (129 yards, 3 touchdowns) running the ball. When Philip Rivers and his team first touched the ball in the second half, it was already 38-7. There was no more competition.

Right after that came one of the best playoff games I’ve ever seen – and if you saw it too, it’s impossible to disagree. 2018 AFC Finals, Patriots and Chiefs.

We already talked earlier this Week 2018 why Kansas City was everyone’s favorite that season, especially with a Patrick Mahomes who became the starter there. The clash of styles was everywhere: the Chiefs, explosive and buoyant for the historic season while the Patriots were the bad guys that were always there; Brady, the veteran who won everything he could against Mahomes, the young man who wanted to take him down. These teams had already faced each other in Week 6 and the game had also been incredible, when the Chiefs lost their unbeaten record in the season.

And the game delivered exactly what it planned: both teams going at each other and very, very balanced, even though they were fundamentally different. The annoying note is that the Patriots’ victory ended in something of an anticlimax, because Kansas City orchestrated an incredible drive to take it into overtime and they never got the ball there because they lost the coin toss.

Belichick masterclass

If stopping Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid was tough enough, the mission against Sean McVay and the Los Angeles Rams offense was no easy one. So the team turned to the Chicago Bears for help?

The Bears had their own painful history that season, losing to the Philadelphia Eagles in the famous Double Doink. As it turns out, in Week 15, the Bears limited the Rams’ offense to just six points. And there was a very clear trend: Vic Fangio crowded the line of scrimmage and didn’t let McVay and Jared Goff identify what was going to happen. When communication between coach and quarterback was cut off, Goff had to decide for himself.

Belichick went with that exact tactic in the Super Bowl, and it probably couldn’t have gone any better. The game ended 13-3 and wasn’t even that interesting to the casual fan but it showed a wonderful tactical battle, with the Patriots changing their defensive calls with 15 seconds left in the play call. McVay could no longer communicate with Goff, so the quarterback’s mission was to quickly process everything that was happening and execute the play.

It went terribly wrong. Patriots Super Bowl champion, again.

We just didn’t know that it was the last game. Rob Gronkowski retired and never played for the New England Patriots again, returning in 2020 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was the last time Brady and Belichick won a playoff game and, of course, the duo’s last Super Bowl together. The team passed the rule like everyone else won: doing their own work in the best way possible.

The 2018 season, one of the coolest of the century, ended like so many others over the past two decades.

New England Patriots no topo.

To know more:
Top-5 TE’s 2023: Kelce follows in the lead, but competition is strong for 2023
ProFootball+ Podcast: The NFL’s Most Underrated Offensive Players
Week 2018: The End of the Rodgers-McCarthy Marriage

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