NFL

Blame for Patriots’ fake punt lands on player

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Bill Belichick left it to his players to blame Patrick Chung for the bone-headed fake punt that helped kill the Patriots’ season.

Belichick sternly refused to discuss how the crucial botched play came about in a 28-21 playoff loss to the Jets yesterday, except to make clear it wasn’t his decision.

“We just made a bad mistake on the play — just a bad mistake,” Belichick said, conveniently bypassing the singular pronoun in favor of the plural.

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But Belichick didn’t prevent his players from throwing Chung under the bus for the play just before halftime that went spectacularly wrong for New England.

A brief recap: Trailing just 7-3 and facing fourth-and-4 from his own 35 with 1:14 left, Chung purportedly called for the fake in his role as the up-back but bungled it by fumbling the direct snap.

Chung was smothered short of the marker almost immediately, and the Jets needed just four plays to make it 14-3, make the Patriots pay for their foolishness and send a stunned chill through the Gillette Stadium capacity crowd.

Some Jets players attributed the play to Belichick’s arrogance, but a handful of Patriots special-teams players claimed the call came from Chung, a second-year safety from Oregon.

Rookie wideout Taylor Price said Belichick gave Chung the freedom to audible a fake punt all the way back in training camp. If that’s the case, Chung picked the wrong time to call it for the first time all season.

“It’s on him,” Price said of Chung. “It’s a short-yardage situation, and [Chung] made the call because we had the numbers on them. It would have definitely swung momentum our way if we could have marched down there and taken the lead before the half.”

The Jets couldn’t help but cackle with glee at their bitter rival’s huge blunder.

“That’s what I think lost the game,” Jets defensive lineman Trevor Pryce said. “I was like, ‘What in the world?’ They knew they had to do something. They were struggling. It was absolutely, 100-percent an act of desperation.”

Added Pryce: “A fake punt at the 30-yard line? Are you serious? They were so smart they outsmarted themselves.”

Belichick refused to take personal blame for the gaffe or put it on special-teams coach Scott O’Brien, but that seemed like a cop-out by the Patriots’ notorious control-freak of a head coach.

Belichick, whose team has now lost its opening playoff game — at home, no less — for the second year in a row, has to shoulder the ultimate blame for allowing a young, inexperienced player the freedom to make that call in such a pivotal situation.

Not that Belichick had any interest in letting the finger get pointed in his direction.

“I’m not even going into it,” he said.

And Belichick’s Patriots aren’t headed anywhere but a long, cold offseason.

bhubbuch@nypost.com