The Patriots fully erased their second 14-point deficit with a lateral from quarterback Tom Brady to receiver Julian Edelman, followed by a perfect spiral from Edelman to a wide-open Danny Amendola, who ran free to the end zone for a 51-yard score.
“Me and Julian have been practicing that for about five years,” Amendola told reporters after the game, even though Amendola and Edelman have been teammates in New England for only two years. “It was a play we had in the books for a little while now, but it ended up working out.”
Edelman said he hadn’t been pushing the coaching staff for a chance to run the play.
“I just kind of sit back and do my job,” Edelman told reporters. “I don’t throw it as good as I used to.”
Quarterback Tom Brady had a different assessment of Edelman’s arm.
“He throws it better than I did,” Brady said of Edelman. “He spun it. It was a perfect spiral right in stride. I’ve gotta make some rules that he can’t throw it better than I can, but he did. It was pretty sweet.”
There was no hint of frustration during or after the game from Brady, despite the general notion that teams with true franchise quarterbacks never take the ball out of the hands of the franchise quarterback. That general notion, of course, makes the gadget play even more effective when used by a team like the Patriots.
“You’ve got to unload everything you’ve got to win against a team like that -- the Baltimore Ravens,” Edelman said. “They played a tough game. Our coaches, they’ve got the aggressiveness to call that.”
But they haven’t displayed that specific type of aggressiveness in a long, long time.
“It’s really the same play we ran against Indianapolis back in ’01 with [David] Patten to Troy Brown, if I remember correctly; same kind of play,” coach Bill Belichick said. “We were lucky they were in a sub-blitz, so they blitzed off the slot. That certainly helped the play out, gave us a little more time. [Rashaan] Melvin came up, the corner came up, Rob [Gronkowski] was able to block it and give Julian a little bit more time to throw the ball. Danny made the catch and outran the safety. It was well executed and I think we caught the right defense.”
They definitely did, and that Edelman-Amendola connection went a long way toward propelling the Patriots to the AFC title game for the ninth time in the Brady-Belichick era.
