He's actually wrong. The very best way to beat the Pats is by taking Moss away. He's our heavy hitter on the offense in a way that he can most hurt the defense. Teams figured out ways to take him out a long time ago. The way they did it was by rolling a safety over the top. Defenses didn't want to do this with Welker because it would leave so many more people open. The Saints, however, gambled and shadowed Welker with a safety of his own. The only time I saw a safety closer than 10 yards to the line of scrimmage was when either Welker or Moss (mostly Welker) was doing work in the flats. The play when Sharper decapitated Faulk stands out. On top of that, they were able to get enormous amounts of pressure with their front four and thus took Brady out of the equation. The Saints basically gambled on the fact that Sam Aiken and our tight ends were not going to beat them and they were right. Aiken had a good chunk of yardage and could have caught a bomb had Brady not missed, but he was not going to win the game for us even if he had caught that for a touchdown. On top of that, due to injuries which once again presented themselves, our tight ends spent most of the game helping out our offensive line blocking (which did no good) and were never really factors themselves.
That's why I said that the Saints had pretty much just given everyone else the basic blueprint on how to stop the Patriots in the game thread. After I said that, some smartass immediately chimed in saying, "oh, get a pass rush with four guys. What a new concept!". No, idiot. That's part of it, but not the whole thing. The Saints were the first team to figure out that the Patriots do not have a game-changing threat at the third WR position and thus rolled their coverage over to take out both Welker and Moss, where other teams hadn't dared to do that to Welker and instead took out Moss. I don't even think Edelman could have helped out much against them at this point (though he will next year and in years to come). This is really the area that made our offense so hard to stop with Stallworth in the line-up. Teams couldn't just drop both of their safeties back to take out Welker and Moss because Stallworth could always burn them deep. We haven't had that viable third threat (and no, Gaffney wasn't it... though he was dependable) since he left the team for Cleveland and then ran over someone like he was inside the game "Grand Theft Auto".
Here's to hoping Tate emerges next season: :eat3: