FOXBORO — Don’t think for a second that the Tennessee Titans think the Patriots were running up the score.

To paraphrase Jeff Fisher — their embattled head coach — what did you expect them to do? Stop playing?

“No, that was their plan going in,” Fisher said when asked if he thought Patriots were running up the score when Tom Brady was throwing the ball for five touchdown passes in the second quarter, racing out to a 45-0 halftime lead.

The Patriots came out with Brady in a shotgun, five-receiver set to open the third quarter. Nine plays, 65 yards and a nine-yard Randy Moss TD pass later, it was 52-0 and Brady’s day was over.

And Fisher’s nightmare couldn’t be scarier.

“Why are they going to change their plan?” Fisher asked rhetorically.

“Ah man, it felt like they were trying to raise their rank in the BCS,” veteran linebacker Keith Bullock lamented.

“But honestly and truthfully, I would expect in anything else,” Bullock said. “I definitely wouldn’t have expected anything else. It’s not their fault we weren’t matching up today. That’s sports.”

What was Brady exploiting?

“You’re directing that at the wrong person,” Bullock replied, without throwing his secondary entirely under the bus. “I really don’t know. There’s a lot of things I don’t know right now and I’m just being cool through this interview.”

“They played,” Fisher added. “We didn’t tackle well in the second half. I didn’t It’s hard to play with the same emotion you carry into a game when you’re down 45. I saw frustration but not a lack of effort.”

Asked about his team’s mood in the dressing room after the debacle, Fisher tried his best at dry humor.

“It was less than celebratory,” Fisher said.

While Fisher had to endure the worst day of his career from the sidelines, the veteran Bullock had no where to hide from Brady’s relentless barrage.

“Tom was out there doing his thing,” Bullock said. “It’s kind of hard to figure out right now.”

“I have been playing sports since I was eight, and never in any sport have I experienced anything like this,” Bullock said. “I guess the problem was we could not stop them. We kept giving them the ball on turnovers. It seemed like whatever they dialed up was working and a couple of times they had great calls for whatever we called.”

“It’s about as bad as it gets,” Tennessee quarterback Kerry Collins admitted of his team’s three lost fumbles and two picks.