The sixth-seeded Baltimore Ravens came to Gillette Stadium yesterday and demolished the once-unbeatable-at-home Patriots, 33-14. Foxborough’s frozen fans booed with gusto as the Ravens steamrolled to a 24-0 first-quarter lead.
“I’d have been booing us, too, the way we played,’’ said quarterback Tom Brady, the man who best knows that this was not a team of nobility, effort, and hard work like the teams he led in the last decade.
This was bad. It was the Winter Un-Classic. Through the golden years at Gillette the motto has been “do your job,’’ but yesterday it appeared the only guys who’d done their job were the Guatemalan snow shovelers who’d been hired to de-ice the stadium. Baltimore’s Ray Rice went 83 yards up the gut on the first play from scrimmage. Rice could have motored up the ramp and onto Route 1, Gump-like, before anyone touched him. The carnage was on. The Patriots succumbed to a hail of interceptions, strip sacks, misplays, and blown coverages.
Proud Vince Wilfork (13 tackles), a mountain of a man who was here in the golden days of ’04, said, “They [Ravens] came in and wanted it more than us, and it showed. We got beat up and it don’t feel good. We didn’t come to play. We didn’t play like it was a playoff game. For them to come in here and do what they did, they could basically have been playing out there with a JV football team and they probably would have given a better effort than we did.
“You saw one team come in here and play it like it was a playoff game and then you seen another club that just went out there going through the motions.’’
Wilfork played with Tedy Bruschi, Richard Seymour, Mike Vrabel, Rodney Harrison, Ty Law, and Ted Johnson - true Patriots who would have shared his embarrassment had they been part of this debacle.
“We just had a different team this year,’’ Brady said. “We had a lot of problems over the course of the year.’’
