Quote:
Originally Posted by pugsnotdrugs19
Which brings me here…
If you wanna denigrate Nagy, I think it can only be for not tapping into Mahomes’ max focus every week. Which may not even be possible for a coach to do at this stage of Pat’s career. But I think focus and attention to detail by players is what causes problems in these games, and if it’s like last year, it just isn’t near the same issue in the playoffs. Not for Patrick at least.
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The part that nobody talks about is it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain focus from July to February. Hell the difference between being done in week 18 vs playing out the playoffs is substantial. That's one of a myriad of reasons it's hard to win consistently.
And it's not to say that we maintained focus through our run. We had bonehead plays and lack of execution sprinkled all throughout our run. And we'd get pissed off about it. The difference between then and now is we could **** off for a few drives and then make some extraordinarily explosive plays and we won a lot of those games.
It's probably worth looking at our run.
2018 we had runs of 5 games, 4 games and 4 games
2019 we had runs of 4 games and 9 to close out the year. But we also lost 3 out of 4 and four out of 6 at one point. That's with healthy Fisher and Schwartz and prime Reek and Kelce.
2020 we ran the first 4 making the total run 13 games. Then we had a run of 10 games. Probably the most consistent football of the run.
2021 we had a run of 9 games to finish before the Bengals game (which mind you is the worst game Pat has ever played), but at one point we lost 2 out of 3 and 4 out of 6 at the beginning of the season. That's right. 7 weeks in we had a losing record.
2022 we had runs of 2 games, 2 games, and 6 games before 8 to win out.
2023 remember we had that dumbass Lions loss to keep the streak at 8. Then we had a run of 6 games, 1 game, and finished with 6 games.
2024 we started with 9 wins to make 15 total, the longest win streak of Pat's career and it had been 4 years since he'd been close. All while fighting some of the worst injury luck in the league, the pressure of a 3 peat, getting everybody's best shot because everybody hates us, and all the ****ing miles of the last 6 years.
Given the history of best player of all time, it's pretty obtuse to sit here and say "ZOMGWTFBBQ THEY LOST FOCUS!!!!1123!!!!one" when they just ran through the best run of Pat's career while facing incomprehensible adversity. Further, the reality is that NO team maintains focus EVERY week. Belicheat was basically a movie bad guy and New England would shit the bed regularly (remember when they got their ass kicked in Arrowhead in September and Benched Brady?). If anyone could do it would be the dude that ran the franchise like a Nazi concentration camp.
Look, it would have been nice to win this one. It really would have set up the last half of the season.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it. It's hard to win. It's doubly hard to win consistently. It is infinitely harder to do what we're trying to do. That's why no one has done it.