When the Detroit Lions hosted the New England Patriots on Sunday Night Football, most experts thought that Tom Brady and company would leave town with a victory. That is why many fans were upset with Matt Patricia after he decided to kick a field goal rather than go for it on fourth-and-inches early in the game.
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After forcing the Patriots to punt on the opening drive of the game, Matthew Stafford and the Lions offense went on a 12 play 65-yard drive that ended with a Matt Prater field goal. The decision to attempt a field goal was made by Patricia after Stafford’s pass to Golden Tate to the Patriots’ 21 yard line came up just inches short of the first down.
As the Lions special teams unit came out to the field, you could clearly hear many of the fans booing Patricia for not going for the first down.
Following the game, Patricia defended his decision to kick the field goal rather than going for the first down.
From Detroit Free Press:
“I know the crowd favorite would have been to go for it, but I think in that point of the game being so early, you need points,” Patricia said. “You need to make sure you maximize every single drive. So at that point if it’s inches or 1 or 2, it doesn’t really matter. You just have to get the points and hope that you’re in a position to play good defense. What you don’t want to do is have something bad happen in that situation and then give them momentum. A game like this is definitely about momentum. And scoring points gives you momentum and that’s what we needed to do.”
Stafford seemed happy that the Lions came up with points on their opening drive, but he stopped short of saying he agreed with the call. Instead, he would rather just leave those decisions up to the coaches.
“I’ll leave that up to those guys,” Stafford said. “There’s some guys upstairs with some charts to figure that stuff out. But any points against a team like that is going to be a good thing, and we had a positive drive. You would have hated to have seen it end with no points, so it was good to get some points. Obviously anytime we get in the red zone we want to score a touchdown, but I think we did a nice job controlling the game.”
