Part of the relentless allure of spectator sports is that even a layperson can correctly observe when a genius does something dumb, and now it is Bill Belichick whose mistakes are on display. Belichick is the best football coach ever, and yet his team just committed perhaps the most foolish game-ending play in history, and now we get to watch him sort through his rubble.
Of course, Belichick did not want Jakobi Meyers to chuck the ball backward to Las Vegas’s Chandler Jones with no time left in a tied game, but Meyers probably assumed that random backward throws into a crowd was the next step in Matt Patricia’s offensive plan. Patricia, of course, calls the plays for Belichick’s offense (the team doesn’t have a coach with the offensive coordinator title). He was a defensive coach for the past decade and a half, except for his years as the Lions head coach, which he spent alienating people and showing no real understanding of how a modern offense should be run.
Pretty much nobody else in the world thought Patricia was the best choice to run the Patriots’s offense. Belichick selected him anyway, and Patricia has been a disaster.
