JJ, your check bounced. Your landlord will be knocking first thing tomorrow. Don’t make him do it again.
What a game. What a night. What a week. It was truly a roller coaster, for Patriots fans and haters alike. I swear we heard it all this week: from the desperate, to the antagonistic, to the flat out shameful. I’ll try to keep it as chronological as possible, but bear with me.
Let’s start with our good friend from the New York Daily News, Manish Mehta, who provided the Pats with a nice packet of bulletin board material to start off the week. Brilliant stuff. My favorite snippet was undoubtedly this:
“The fine folks that make up Patriot Nation will now convince themselves that osmosis will help rookie Jacoby Brissett win the next two games against the Texans and Bills before Brady returns from exile. Spoiler alert: He won’t.”
Thanks for the spoiler, Manish. That being said, he did take responsibility for his words, offering another article after the game in which can be easily summarized, “I will never doubt Bill Belichick again, and you shouldn’t ether”. I certainly can do without his predictably ludicrous click-baiting pieces, but I get it. Throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, something is bound to stick someday, maybe. You have to respect that kind of grind. To his credit though, he was accountable. That’s far more than we can say about his colleague down the street, Bart Hubbuch of the New York Post.
For those of you who don’t follow him on twitter, or aren’t familiar with Bartholemew or his “work”, I envy you. To put it simply, he’s a miserable, hypocritical…(deep breaths, deep breaths)… I’m not his biggest fan, let’s just leave it at that. Bart’s downright sickly obsession with the Pats continued, as he framed the Patriots as racists to start out the week, stating:
“Totally non-shocking fact: The Patriots have never had a black QB start a game in their 57-year history. Jacoby Brissett would be the first.”
Why is that “totally non-shocking”? I was quite frankly pretty surprised when I heard that. Hubbuch is probably right though, I’m sure the only reason Brady managed to just barely squeeze out the starting job over Rohan Davey was because of their respective skin color. Anyone with 2/3 of a brain knows that Bill Belichick doesn’t care if you’re black, white, yellow, or green. If you can do the job, you’ll be on the field. As you can imagine, Bart got some well-deserved slack for this one and even ended up deleting his twitter account. Not sure what I screamed louder for, Brissett’s tuck and run for 25 and a touchdown, or when I clicked on Hubbuch’s twitter page and it no longer existed. You can read Jerry Thornton’s (WEEI) thoughts on that here.
Okay, I’m done with social media. We’re onto Houston, and it won’t be the only time this year. I’m staying in house for two of the best pre-game pieces of the week. Boss man Mike D broke down his game plan for the week , and resident film junky (no really, I’m concerned…) Pete Smith hit us with some knowledge here: Mike gave us his points of emphasis and hit the nail on the head when discussing a particular, turns out significant, facet of Jacoby’s game, his legs:
“Brissett knows he’s hard to tackle and that he can run, which is good (because he can) and bad (because he might try to take hits and get away when he should go down). There’s a big difference between the two and the NFL is a whole new ball game. But I don’t care how many sacks or incompletions Brissett throws. If he doesn’t throw a pick or cough up a fumble, the Pats will have a chance to win the game.”
We knew he’d be more of a threat to run than ol’ Clydesdale TB12, but 60 yards and a score on 12 carries (AND NO TURNOVERS) for the rook was almost too good to be true.
Pete provided a thorough breakdown of why the Patriots would end the night 3-0, and made a particularly noteworthy point about the potential catalyst for the running game’s fast start this season:
“In my opinion, the single greatest factor contributing to Blount’s success is the return of James Devlin to the lineup. That’s a lot of beef coming at you in an NFL where defenses are getting increasingly smaller as a response to increasingly pass-heavy offenses league-wide.”
The NFL zigs, Belichick zags. This is chess, not checkers, ladies and gentlemen.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, Marshall Faulk picked against the Patriots on Thursday Night, to the tune of, I believe 28-17. Maybe time doesn’t heal all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVI Pretty tough to take Marshall seriously with his insufferable, unwavering, blatantly bias hate towards our team. I’d rather have the weatherman say there’s a 50% chance of rain every day than listen to Marshall opine on a Patriots game. At least the weatherman readily admits he has no idea what he’s talking about.
As for the actual game? Mutilation. The Pats were bigger, faster, smarter, and tougher. Defense and special teams were the X-Factors as expected, with the field possession battle grossly one-sided in Belichick and co’s favor. Nevertheless, it’s never truly a Patriots victory without the postgame nausea inducing trolling from opposing fans.
The two hottest takes on the market: Elway is a genius for letting Osweiler go, and Tom Brady (yes, that Tom Brady) is an overrated “system” quarterback. One, Elway was outbid for Osweiler, and wisely bowed out when the numbers started to get out of control. A shrewd move, sure, I’ll concede that. And two, the laziest, most careless and nonsensical take of all time, the “system QB” take.
This is the take that comes from football fans who only have the opportunity to see their favorite team get annihilated at the hands of NE once every couple years. What system? Is this the Georgia Tech triple option offense? Do you watch football or just read the score after? Jacoby (Tom Bless him, he did great) threw for an underwhelming 101 yards on 19 pass attempts. That sounds like two Tom Brady drives. Stop the madness.
The fact that a LOADED Pats team beat the sorry Texans at home with a rookie QB takes nothing away from Brady’s greatness. The Brady that has been within minutes of a Super Bowl with Reche Caldwell as his top target. The Brady who has thrown the ball 50+ times and won games. This reminds me of a scene in “The Town” when the cops try to intimidate Douggy and he responds, emotionless: “Every pewee in town knows what an FBI rear antenna looks like. So in the future if you guys need to try to be slick, be slicker than a six year old. I gotta get back to work. Can I go? Good luck with that print.”
Every Pats fan in New England knows what a troll sounds like. Be better. You’ll need to be. Four quarters left. Time is running out.