This was Seymour’s best game of the year. He was a monster—the Rams had no answer for him. He closed down his side of the line, put pressure on the QB and cleaned up in backside pursuit. He was as dominating as a down man can be in this defense.

We should get Borges to profile Ty Warren next week—I thought he had a rough game (and has been having a slow year to date).

While I think both the roughing the passer play and the late hit out of bounds call also should have been thrown flags, to say the officiating was “a disgrace” is just his homerism coming out. Even had those calls been made, I’m sure he would have been complaining about the inequities in the penalty count, which is based on the flawed assumption that all teams play in a manner that draws the same number of penalties.

The Thomas hit on Bulger was not a facemask, either; though Thomas’ hand did hit the mask he didn’t close his hand on it or jerk it (for either the now defunct 5-yard, or the 15-yard personal foul variety of facemask call). If you do throw a flag on that play, you’d throw it for hands-to-the-face or roughing the passer, but not a facemask, but it wasn’t blatant enough for that. Were they not playing the Patriots and instead it were another team that wasn’t collectively hated by almost the entire league, any fan outside of the St. Louis area would likely have agreed it was a good non-call.

And the Belichick blow-up he rants about was when Bill was frustrated that they blew the whistle before Cassel had actually knelt the ball out on the Patriots final possession. This was obvious to anyone watching the game, and if it wasn’t the FOX announcers actually reiterated it a few times to make it clear to the especially stupid (I guess for the Miklasz level of IQ, they should have discussed it even more). Given that the Patriots were trying to bleed clock, and we saw what one second on the clock can do in the Falcons/Bears game a couple of weeks ago, I think the complaint is justified even if Bill’s outward lack of composure was not.