New England Patriots: Week 4 proves there was never a QB competition

Without Cam Newton, the New England Patriots lost to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday night. The team is now 2-2 on the season.

The New England Patriots took a tough loss in Week 4 to the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs.

While it would have been a surprise to see the Patriots pull off a win, there were times where the game was in reach.

You have to come away from this game feeling really good about the Patriots defense. There really weren’t many times where they looked overwhelmed despite going up against the best offense in the National Football League. That unit kept New England in the game as long as it could.

The offense, on the other hand… was bad to the point where it was almost impressive. I’ll admit I’m a younger fan, and Tom Brady is pretty much all I had ever known prior to this season. That makes it easy to say that this was the single worst display of New England Patriots quarterbacking I have ever seen.

Brian Hoyer got the nod to start in Cam Newton’s absence, and we saw almost immediately why he has only started seven games total over the last three seasons. This dude SUCKS.

Literally the last thing you can afford to do in this situation is take a sack. My guy held the ball for at least four seconds and then tried to run backwards like he’s Russell Wilson, with the clock winding down and no timeouts. This is a veteran who has been in the league for over a decade, by the way.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he cost the team another three points in the third quarter by losing a fumble with the offense once again in the redzone:

It would be forgivable if the rush came from his blindside, but there is no way this man didn’t see his right tackle get absolutely smoked in his peripheral vision and he still just didn’t react to it at all. What’re we doing here?

Hoyer was mercifully pulled from the game shortly after, and Jarrett Stidham saw some action. All there is to say about Stidham is that he looked like a fourth round pick with limited experience.

I get that I’m armchair quarterbacking, but there’s no way anyone can say that there was ever a real competition for that starting job in training camp after watching this game. Once Cam Newton proved he was healthy it wasn’t close. Any indication to say otherwise had to have been a smokescreen.

It’s such a sore loser thing to say, but the Patriots win this game easily with Cam Newton. Kansas City didn’t do anything extraordinarily well in this game. It was almost entirely self inflicted wounds that cost the Patriots. Everything that could have gone wrong offensively did go wrong, and they just looked lost without their starting quarterback.

Thank goodness the rest of the NFL gave up on Cam Newton, because without him the Patriots would not be very fun to watch. Here’s to a speedy recovery for New England’s QB1, because with him in the fold this team can hang with anyone.