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Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s work in putting together a game plan to handle both the elements and the Bills on Monday night earned him a lot of praise during and after New England’s 14-10 victory.
Bills head coach Sean McDermott wasn’t so willing to credit Belichick’s work as the deciding factor in the game. McDermott pointed to a lost fumble in Patriots territory and the mistakes his team made during two fruitless trips into the red zone in the fourth quarter driving factors in why the Bills wound up on the wrong side of the final score.
“Let’s not give more credit than we need to give credit to Bill Belichick in this one,” McDermott said, via NESN.com. “Whether it was Bill or anybody else, they beat us, right? But you sit here and you tell me when we start with an average starting field position of the 40-yard line and he starts with the 23-yard line — I’m rounding up in both cases — and we were 1-for-4 in the red zone and they were 0-for-1 in the red zone? You give me that ahead of time, I’d say I like my chances. I like my chances. I don’t think, with all due respect, it’s not a Bill Belichick-type thing. It’s what are you doing with the opportunities you got? What are you doing with the opportunities you got? We turned the ball over on the plus-30-something yard line. Sloppy football. Sloppy football. I’m very comfortable in that situation.”
The Bills are now 3-4 since starting the season with a 4-1 record and they’ve been plagued by many of the same issues that hurt them on Monday throughout that stretch. That supports the notion that it wasn’t all about Belichick, but it probably won’t make anyone feel better about the state of the Bills right now.