[Colts And Orioles]

Originally Posted by TheMugwump

I say that primarily because winning 6 Super Bowls will always be a greater coaching accomplishment than an 11-5 season that didn't make the playoffs.

That, plus fuck the Patriots and Belichick.

But looking even more closely at that season, let's see who those 11 wins came against.

Four of those wins came against the teams in a division where a 9-7 team ran away with it. The NFC West was easily the worst division if the league that year.

Unless you want to count the AFC West, who' division champ was the 8-8 Chargers, who actually beat the Patriots that year. By 20 points. Of course three other NE wins came against the other three in that division.

That makes seven wins against the teams from the embarrassingly inept divisions in the league. The other four came against the 7-9 Bills (two of the wins), the 9-7 Jets, and the eventual division champion Dolphins who ended up 11-5.

That means they won three games against teams with winning records, and two of those teams had 9-7 records. The cumulative record of their opponents was 96 - 112. Hardly Murderer's Row. And yeah, no Brady, but as many have brought up over the years, the Patriots of that era were a complete team, not a top-heavy, unbalanced mix who's HoF QB had to drag to victory week after week.

Was it a good coaching job to go 11-5 with Cassell? Sure. But anyone who thinks it was best coaching job ever by a six-time SB winning coach shouldn't be taken seriously (and to be fair, you never said this, you just mentioned that some have argued this).

And yeah, I'm super bored this Sunday morning.

o

I took them seriously, and I agree with them. Your point is taken in regard to the 2008 Patriots' relatively weak schedule, but bad teams (and even average teams) don't go 11-5 in the NFL, regardless of how strong/weak their schedule is. As someone once said, there are no Miami of Ohio's in the NFL. To the other extreme, the Colts went 2-14 without Peyton Manning in 2011, and came back and went 11-5 the following season with Andrew Luck behind center. That was a quintessential example of a team that was heavily quarterback-dependent. When Brady came back the following season in 2010, the Patriots went 10-6. They were a quintessential example of a complete team.

o