AP

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said on Monday that he views his team as close to 8-0 because all four of Seattle’s losses have been close. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady could make the same claim about his team, but he says he doesn’t view it that way.

The Patriots are 5-3 with two losses by one point and one loss by two points, so they could easily claim that they’re only three plays away from being 8-0. But Brady dislikes that mindset.

“We’re at where we really deserve to be,” Brady said on WEEI. “I don’t think we’ve played any better than our record. We don’t deserve to be anything better than we are. Look, every team can go, ‘Wow, without these plays we could be undefeated.’ Every team can say that. But we’re not, and there’s a reason why. It’s not like we’ve played great football over these last eight weeks. There is a lot of improvement we need to make. There is a lot of things we can do better. We need to get some guys healthy. We have to get everybody moving forward and make a big push here in the second half because this is where the best teams really start to show themselves.”

Four of the Patriots’ five wins came by double-digit margins, and the Patriots lead the league in net points, having outscored their opponents by a total of 262-170 this season, so if there’s any team in the league that can make a case for being better than its record, that team is New England.

But Brady prefers to simply say that the Patriots are what their record says they are.