Confidence became dominance last night.
New England ended the Cinderella season of Tebow and the Broncos with a 45-10 victory, a wire-to-wire win that sends the Patriots into the AFC Championship game a week from today against today’s Baltimore-Houston winner.
It is the sixth conference championship game appearance for the Patriots during the Bill Belichick era.
“It was a good, solid team effort. It’s been a lot of hard work this year. The players deserve this; they put up with me,’’ a self-deprecating Belichick said. “It’s an honor to be in the AFC Championship.’’
It was the first win for the Patriots in three postseason meetings against the Broncos, and also ended New England’s three-game postseason losing streak. Before last night, the Patriots’ last win in the playoffs was the 2007 AFC title game over San Diego.
Tom Brady threw for 363 yards, an NFL postseason record-tying six touchdowns, and had one pretty nice punt, while Tebow completed just nine passes and was basically running for his life for much of the night.
After Brady’s punt, a minor skirmish broke out, in which frustrated Broncos Robert Ayers and Von Miller were hit with unnecessary roughness penalties. But cooler heads quickly prevailed.
The Patriots cleared one hurdle early, figuring out a way to banish their troubling pattern of slow starts. They vaulted to a 35-7 lead after one half.
Denver won the coin toss and elected to defer, and the Patriots got the ball to open the game for only the second time this season.
The Patriots did something a little different, starting the game in no-huddle; generally they don’t switch into it until they’ve had a couple of possessions. But as it almost always does, the faster pace worked to their advantage, and they scored less than two minutes in, covering 80 yards in a tidy five plays.
