Belichick's Greatest Hits No. 13: Going 11-5 With Matt Cassel

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There's a great moment in what is truly one of the best movies of the last 30 years, Apollo 13, when one thing after another has gone horribly wrong and everyone is desperately scrambling for contingency plan after contingency plan. So the NASA bureaucrat says, "This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever experienced." To which Ed Harris' Gene Kranz, who's in charge of the mission angrily responds, "With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour." 

And in the end, he turned out to be right. 

For similar reasons, it can be argued that the 2008 season was Bill Belichick's finest hour as coach of the Patriots. I was one of the vast majority of Pats fans arguing it at the time. And even the local media that saw him as a vengeful Lovecraftian god sent to our world to torment them tended to agree. 

So while it might seem contradictory to say his "finest hour" belongs at No. 13 on his "Greatest Hits" list, I regret nothing. He created the culture of winning here. And it would be disrespectful of that legacy to rank a season that didn't even result in a playoff spot above all the moments that led to championships. This was the season where he fell short. But it's also the one where he was in the position of underdog for the first time since he created the Dynasty. So it belongs here. Just not in the top dozen. 

It's not necessary to go into a ton of detail here. Suffice to say that teams that lose the Super Bowl traditionally do not recover the following year. 

NBC Sports Chicago -  Out of the first 56 Super Bowl losers, 39 came back to make the playoffs the next season. The 69.6% playoff rate would refute the notion of a “Super Bowl runner-up jinx.”

Of the 17 runners-up that failed to make the playoffs, 11 did not even reach a .500 record -- like the 2003 Raiders. All 11 instances have come since 1989, with the earliest being the 1989 Denver Broncos and the most recent being the 2019 San Francisco 49ers. 

Those are the numbers from losing any Super Bowl in any fashion. The 2008 Patriots were coming off the greatest cosmic titty twister in the history of professional sports. Following the math, it followed that they'd collapse like a sand castle in the tide while operating in the shadow of The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named, Part I. Under even the best of circumstances. 

What they got to kick off the season was the worst of circumstances. Something that never happened before or after in Tom Brady's 23-year career. He missed games with an injury. All the games. With the exception of the first half of the 1st quarter of Week 1. Rated TV-MA for GOAT violence. Fewer discretion is advised:

As a side note, this was how we were basically introduced to Bernard Pollard. Before he established himself as the Typhoid Mary of Patriots Lower Leg Injuries. He was on the field when Wes Welker blew out his ACL (non-contact injury). Destroyed Rob Gronkowski's ankle in the 2011 AFC championship game. And then just for laughs knocked Stevan Ridley out cold in another playoff game and forced a fumble. 

So with no other choice, Belichick turned to his 26 year old backup, Matt Cassel, who had been on the roster for three years, appeared in parts of 14 games, and completed 22 passes for 253 yards in his career of mop-up duty. Which, believe it or not, was less experience than the 7th round draft pick had in four years of college:

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This was yet another example of how the Patriots couldn't fallen apart, packed it in mentally and emotionally, gave into despair, and waited for Brady to bring them back to their former glory. But they did the opposite. 

Belichick kept them focused and motivated. He brough Cassel along slowly. At first anyway. With fewer than 25 pass attempts in his first two games, both of them wins. Then let him off the leash. Over a 13-week span, Cassel had north of 30 attempts in 12 of those games. The peak being a 51-attempt shootout against Brett Favre, then with the Jets on a Thursday night. That one went to overtime when Cassel hit Randy Moss in the back corner of the end zone with 0:01 left.

That is particularly memorable because Moss caught it right in front of where my brother and I were sitting. And to this day it represents the only game I've missed doing a Knee Jerk Reaction to in all the time I've been at Barstool, owing to the fact we didn't get home until about 4am and I slept all the next day. I vowed to never again let a thing like exhaustion and the inability to write proper sentences keep me from that duty. And judging by the incoherence of a lot of KJRs since, I've kept that promise.

Anyway, that one was under the old rules, so when Favre led the Jets to a field goal on the opening possession, there would be no chance for Cassel to answer. No one knew for certain at the time that that one scoring drive was the difference between making the playoffs and missing them. Even though the Patriots went on a tear to end the season, winning five out of their last six, it wouldn't be good enough. 

This was a tough year at the top in the AFC, with no less than six teams with 11 wins or more. The Patriots lost a tie breaker to Miami for the division, and to Baltimore for the second Wild Card. And became just the second team in the 16-game era to go 11-5 and miss the playoffs. 

But it should be lost on no one that the Patriots team that smashed records with Brady the year before, rallied around a new QB1 who had never started a game and had fewer than 500 passing yards at any level since he left high school. They finished eighth in the league in points scored, and eighth in fewest points allowed, and still won 11 games. They just did it in a year where 11 games wasn't good enough. 

As for Cassel, Belichick traded him to Scott Pioli's Chiefs that offseason for a 2nd rounder. Not a bad haul considering he'd been drafted 230th overall four years earlier. And to further make the case of how great a job the coach did for him in New England, he left here with a 10-5 record as a starter. In his other 11 years in the league playing for six other teams, he was 26-40.

So just remember not to let the job Belichick did in that lost season go unnoticed in all the postseason success that is about to follow. And never forget 2008 when someone tries to make the case it was only Brady all along.