Coping With Loss: Seattle Seahawks Edition

Losses are never fun. Sunday Night losses? No thanks.  You wait around all day for the game, it finally gets here, and then your team loses and it's time for bed and Monday is ready to smack you in the face with an ironing board.

But fear not. All is not lost. As far as losses go, this one could have gone a lot worse. Here are five reasons not to be too grumpy this week.

Affordable loss. At 7-2, New England is still in complete control and extremely well-positioned to secure at least a playoff bye. Furthermore, it was a non-conference loss, which means it isn't going to factor into any tiebreakers should that time come. This is one of those Ls that you take, learn from, and move on fairly quickly. Not really that big a deal.

The Patriots needed this. New England has more or less been coasting since Tommy B came back from suspension and haven't really been smacked around much this season. Well not anymore. Sunday night was a brutal, beat-em-up slugfest where Seattle was looking to give as much pain as possible and the team with the ball last won it

Unique offensive scheme. The way the Seahawks beat the Patriots was a way that no other team they will see this year is able to execute. Things you never see -€” great field position, chunk plays, deep completions -€” were all huge factors in contributing to Seattle taking this one. That's Russell Wilson's bread and butter, and you have to tip your cap to his execution on Sunday night. But if that's what you need to do to beat this team...I'm OK with that.

This was one of those weeks. If you look back at Week 10 as a whole, pretty much nothing went New England's way. Denver snatched victory from the jaws of defeat on some absolute absurdity. Miami was poised to lose on a late FG only to seal the game with a pick six. KC overcame a 17 point deficit to beat out the Panthers. Every game set to fall in the Patriots favor didn't, and that trickled into the Sunday night game as the Patriots started hot, but grew sluggish and couldn't really get anything going on either side of the ball. What can you do. This kind of thing happens every year without fail. What sucks is that I wouldn't classify this as that annual game that the Patriots absolutely should have won but didn't for whatever reason, so I'll likely be writing this again when the team craps the bed against the Jets or the Rams.

Return of Dion Lewis. We were all hoping to see Lewis on Sunday night, but he was inactive. I'll say for sure that the Patriots could have used Lewis last night, as he brings a skillset to the offense that New England hasn't had just yet. James White has done a more than satisfactory job of filling in in his absence, but Lewis just brings something else to the table that the Patriots haven't seen yet.

We'll always have that play. If the Giants get to scream 18-1 for the rest of time, we get to beat the Malcolm Butler pick into the ground as well. Of course, you always want to look ahead and live in the present and all that stuff, but you know what? Screw that. What a great play! Let's enjoy it!