Mandatory Credit: David Butler II-US PRESSWIRE
Raise your hand if you had the Patriots losing at home to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday. Yep, that’s what I thought; millions of survivor pools were trashed today when the Cardinals kept the vein of NCAA upsets going and pulled out a shocker in New England, upending and holding off the Patriots 20-18.
The Cardinals dominated the whole game — wow I never thought I’d ever type that. Feels dirty in a way. But Kevin Kolb, who got slammed this preseason and benched in favor of John Skelton, came in and proved he can be the guy in Arizona. It wasn’t a neat and tidy game by any means but do you honestly think a soul in Arizona cares about that right now, they just beat the Patriots on the road.
Tom Brady was awful today, staying under 200 yards passing for most of the game and ending the contest with just one touchdown and an interception to cancel it out.
But Patriots fans are grinding their axes for another player who blew the game and is therefore taking all the blame. The golden child Brady led the Patriots back from a 20-9 deficit to line them up for a game winning field goal thus avoiding a week of embarrassment. Stephen Gostkowski is usually a solid kicker but when the game was on the line, he did his best Mike Vanderjagt impression rather than his Adam Vinatieri.
With time running out, Gostkowski lined up for the game-winning field goal and he shanked it. There’s really no other way to describe it he just literally shanked the kick and choked the Patriots out of the win. Obviously the kicker always gets the blame, even though Brady and the Patriots played an atrocious game throughout.
In fact Gostkowski accounted for 12 of the Patriots final 18 points, but it’s the missed three that he has that will have people talking after this one.
Now we live in a world where the New England Patriots are 1-1 while the Arizona Cardinals are proudly 2-0 behind fine work in back-to-back weels from Kevin Kolb.
No, I don’t like it either.
