I know a lot of people are piling on Brady, deservedly so. But I believe, and I may be in the minority, that coaching led to those mistakes. We opened the game with our best first half performance ever. We ran a lot of play action and motion. We scored 17 points fairly easy, and we got Evans involved early and often. This should be proof that whenever we involve Evans, our offense looks much better. This game was wrapped up at halftime had we kept the same aggressiveness and adjusted as needed. Even Bowles was more aggressive on 4th down (which he should be since he trusts the defense and they played dominantly). The second half is where I blame coaching. That fake punt was HORRIBLE. If you were going to go for it on 4th and 1, why take it out of the offenses hands, which was effective the entire game until that point? It was only 1 yard. The Bengals ST coordinator said when Gio went in, they knew something was up since he’s never in there during punts. As for the pressure, players said that the Bengals ran more stunts. Byron, if he was a decent coordinator, he would bring in extra OL and max protect or try to help Brady. Instead, we went back to conservative play calling. We stopped the play action, stopped motion, and went back to runs up the middle on first down. This led to the defense knowing what we were doing, which led to Brady being uncomfortable again. Yes, brady is to blame for those turnovers but the change in aggressiveness and creativity hurt. Also, when the flood gates open, a good HC can stop the leak and keep the team focused. With Arians, there were games we were down 3 scores and rallied, or gave up big leads and still pulled it off. With this passive, conservative head coach, there is nothing from him to fire up the team. Bruce would flip at refs for bad calls and they’d end up keeping an eye on it. On the Bengals first TD, they held Tryin-Shoyinka the entire play and instead of Bowles lighting up the ref which would have him maybe keep an eye on it, he just had his normal stupid face. Coaching matters. Adjustments matter. We adjusted backwards. We wanted to sit on a 17-3 lead, the same way we wanted to sit on the lead against the Browns. Bowles says he wants to run the team this way because he felt we were burned out in the playoffs last year (though you could argue rallying from 27-3 means you aren’t as burned out and the all out blitz was just a bad call instead of the defense being gassed). Under Arians, sure we had times the offense became passive, but when we needed to be aggressive, we were. In the 2 playoff runs, we didn’t let up the gas. In the NFCCG we went to score before the half and got aggressive. Against the Eagles last year, the game was wrapped up and we made sure to go up 31-0. Bowles would’ve sat on a 14-0 lead. Anyways we suck bad and if you want my full reaction, it’s here: https://youtu.be/lmtaWE63lis
Somehow, we are still in first and even if we lose to the Cardinals (who may start a 3rd stringer, which means he will look like Joe Montana against us), we still win the division if we beat the Panthers and Falcons. Crazy!