“The ball is right there,’’ Welker said. “I’ve just got to make the play. It’s a play I’ve made a thousand times in practice and everything else. It comes to the biggest moment of my life and I don’t come up with it.
“It’s one I’ll have to live with.’’
Brady didn’t take any blame after the game. He simply said he’d throw it again to Welker in that spot.
With that, Welker was fitted for goat horns in some circles.
Should he be?
Of course not. In a 60-minute football game with 46 active players on each side and 133 plays, anyone else could have made one more play to put the Patriots over the top.
It didn’t happen, so the biggest missed opportunity will be chewed over for a long time.
Two veteran NFL assistant coaches - a quarterbacks coach and a receivers coach - were asked about the play. They don’t know the exact play-call and how the Patriots teach the play, but they agreed that the back-shoulder throw was not the type of pass Welker expected.
“You don’t have to throw a back-shoulder on that because you’re in the seam, and if you’ve thrown it properly, you beat the safety by taking some air out of the throw,’’ the quarterbacks coach said. “I think that was an inaccurate ball. Anytime you get an inaccurate ball, that’s a tough catch when you’re running vertically toward the goal line like Welker was.
“I wouldn’t count that as a drop if I were charting my football team.’’
The receivers coach agreed, to a point.
“You expect that ball to be in front,’’ he said. “But in the end, it was a catchable ball. Was it where it should have been? No, it’s not where you normally expect it. You’d like it out in front and just run into it.
“It was behind him and it would have been, not a great catch, but a good catch. And he just missed the ball.’’
In defense of Welker, and his statement that he’s made that catch a thousand times, that was simply not true this season.
An examination of the 195 passes thrown to Welker shows that not once did Brady throw back-shoulder and high before that fateful play.
