The football gods can be cruel — especially the NFL gods.

What would’ve been better for the New England Patriots, to have gotten blown out by a bad Miami team or suffer replay ripping away the potential winning score – lliterally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and leaving fans’ jaws dropping?

And with the Patriots 1-4 after Sunday’s gut wrenching 15-10 loss at the hands of the equally inept Miami Dolphins, does any of that really matter?

The Patriots simply can’t score. Their only TD was set up by a Christian Gonzalez interception, and as impressive as their next to last drive was that looked like it would win the game was, 10 points is 10 points. And 12 penalties for 105 yards are,well, horrendous.

What now?

“Yeah, it was frustrating,” Patriots quarterback Jacoby Brissett said, as he’ll face another week of whether he should remain the starter over rookie Drake Maye and his rookie coach, Jerod Mayo, no doubt faces another week with the media questioning the morale of the team as well as his coaching ability. “Honestly, nothing was good. Penalties taking us backwards, we just — honestly, we’ve just got to play better.

“It’s getting to that point where you’ve just got to play better. Penalties in the wrong situations, in bad situations. We’re not good enough to do that and to go backwards to try to score points. We need to continue to go forward. We’ve got to change that, fix that.”

In some ways, it was incredible that two bad teams — can Tua Tagovailoa’s absence really make this big of a difference for Miami?– can slog through three quarters before creating some down-to-the-wire drama. Dolphins no-name QB Tyler Huntley actually looks like if he can get some more games under his belt he could do something, but Tyreek Hill will be waiting for a big play for a while, most likely.

And the Patriots actually averaged 8 yards a carry — but didn’t run the ball when they had a chance to get in the end zone to avoid the toe-tap replay that ruined their day and a few more to come.

“The play calls are the play calls,” back Rhamondre Stevenson said. “We need to execute them to the highest level.”

But how high a level this team can reach, as we all know, is the question we all feel we know the answer to. The bar is low.

“We’re making plays,”Brissett said. “We’re just shooting ourselves in the foot. We’re going one step forward to go 20 steps back. It’s like we can’t do that. Until we get to that point, we’re going to continue to be frustrated at the small things. You can’t leave the game into the refs’ hands. That’s not what football is about. You’ve got to go out there, play with good fundamentals, technique, do the little things right. This league is so hard already. The margin of error is so slim, and to not be able to do that because of lack of focus and a lack of things that we all have control over, we’re not good enough for that yet.”

And it’s a question, after losing to these Dolphins at home,whether they ever will be.