How High Should Rubble Bounce, Anyway?
This was not a Given Sunday. Of the 11 NFL games played yesterday, six were decided by 21 points or more, and the Raiders 33-22 win over the Eagles was at 31-7 in the third quarter. In fact, the closest thing the league had to an upset was itself a rout, the Bengals' 41-17 road thumping of the Ravens in which Cincinnati scored the last 28 points.
Routs don't get scrutinized for their meaning as often as do closer games. This is because their meaning is usually obvious. The upset rout cited in the above paragraph demonstrated that Ja'Marr Chase is a bad man and that one-man offenses have a tough go in the NFL even if the man is Lamar Jackson. Nobody needs to see the All-22 to learn those things. NFL Red Zone does fine.
The most obvious lesson taught by most routs is that some teams are good, very good or excellent, and others are weak, bad or outright dismal. Such were the meanings of Buccaneers 38-Bears 3 and Cardinals 31-Texans 5. The moral of Titans 27-Chiefs 3 was equally obvious, at least for one team. The Chiefs have issues with a capital I. Maybe issues in all-caps.
So what are we to make of the rout de tutti routs, Patriots 54-Jets 13? We knew coming in that the Jets were a very bad team indeed. Does the score indicate the Pats are a correspondingly good one?
Not necessarily. No sane observer is rushing out to call the Giants playoff-bound because they throttled the Panthers 25-3. All that game proved is that Sam Darnold still stinks. New England fans can certainly be encouraged that their team proved itself capable of a totally dominant performance on both sides of the ball no matter how poor their opposition. But encouraged is a long long way from "we're back, baby." Best to hold off on those assertions until maybe Thanksgiving.
With the exception of Randy Moss, I cannot think of a Pats offensive player in the past two decades renowned for foot speed. The 2021 Pats as a roster would not field much of a 4x100 relay team. But every player on the Pats was faster than any Jets I saw on defense yesterday. I felt sorry for their linebackers, always arriving at the scene of the play about eight yards too late.
I cite this example because group physical mismatches are very rare in the NFL, and a team with a congenitally slow defense is going to be in the running for next year's number one draft pick no matter what else it does. The Jets might be the worst team in a league that's fielding quite a few very bad ones this season.
The Pats ought to know. Their three wins have come against two of the weakest, the Jets and Texans (combined record 2-11). One of their losses came against another sad case, the 1-6 Dolphins. Against teams with a pulse, New England's victories have been strictly of the moral variety.
It's perfectly understandable that Bill Belichick was merciless yesterday when really Mac Jones could've taken a knee on every snap after Zach Wilson got hurt without jeopardizing victory. The coach's team needed to see and more important feel that it could whip another NFL team, any team, even the Jets. It needed 60 minutes of artificial confidence to start a journey towards real confidence.
Coaches despise the term "moral victory." For one thing, have too many, and a coach gets fired. For another, they all know how easily moral victories can became moral defeats. There's not much of a line between "they're one of the best and we were right with them" and "we played our best and didn't win anyway." The latter idea is a fatal one leading to a pessimism doom cycle. When a team stops believing good things will happen, good things stop happening.
Everyone with an interest in the Patriots, from Belichick on down to long-time listeners - first-time callers, should be pleased, even happy with yesterday's game. Their team has proved beyond a doubt this season that it's much much better than the New York Jets.
How happy that should make those folks strikes me as an open question.
Tale As Old As Time Since Ted Williams Got Here
The Red Sox have won four playoff games and lost two so far. Commentary on their to date exemplary performance has focused on Alex Cora's management of a guessing game pitching staff and Kiki Hernandez's metamorphosis into Roy Hobbs.
The view from cruising altitude reveals a simpler story. In their four wins, the Sox have scored at least six runs in each game. In their two losses, they didn't, scoring none and four respectively.
Way back in 1990, then-Boston manager Joe Morgan was asked to give an overview of his club's performance that season sometime in July, "We're still the same old Red Sox," Morgan said. "When we hit we win."
Three decades and three world titles later, that summary still appears accurate.
Premature Requiem for a Welterweight
Way back in the 1980s, the Celtics were the hot team in Boston and had what is now called the Pink Hat crowd. Still, deep in the public consciousness, the Red Sox came first in most sporting hearts.
This led me to formulate a semi-facetious theory. The Sox tended to have excellent starts only to falter in midsummer, right about when the NBA Finals concluded. So I opined that Boston's baseball team tended to do its best when the fewest people were paying attention to it.
This theory was rousingly validated last weekend when the Sox swept Washington to make the playoffs when there was no sports topic in town except Tom Brady's return to Gillette Stadium. I mean, local TV news had live shots outside the Patriots' home hours and hours before game time in their broadcasts last Sunday well before they ran the highlights of the Red Sox' comeback win. "Oh, yeah, Sox make playoffs" was an afterthought.
Boston hosts the Yankees tonight in the winner-take-all (if getting to face the Rays is one's idea of "all") wild card game. The Red Sox have the sports stage all to themselves not only here, but across the entire country. Does the Gee Theory mean they're doomed to take that stage and stumble into the orchestra pit?
Not at all. There's no theory extant that can predict the outcome of one baseball game with more than 50 percent accuracy. Greyhound racing handicapping would be easier. I will say it's unlikely the Red Sox will go on to win the World Series. Like all wild card teams except the '21 Dodgers, they have been too inconsistent to predict that.
But the point of this post is not the future, it's to examine what the Red Sox have already done. Specifically, it's to examine how they performed relative to the expectations of late March.
Those expectations were not high among either fans or the baseball community itself. How could they be after Boston's horrid 2020 semi-season? The consensus was for an upgrade to mediocrity. The most optimistic scenario presented by said consensus was that the Sox did possess a strong enough lineup core that with improved pitching they could contend for a wild card playoff sport.
Lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. Boston's all-conquering first half the season was a mirage, its dreadful August simply reversion to the mean. If the team won a wild card by the skin of its teeth, well, that's how most wild card teams get in each season. If they were better, they'd win their divisions.
When the most optimistic preseason predictions come true, how can that not be a good year? So the '21 Sox didn't go worst-to-first. They weren't the Miracle Mets, or even the '13 Red Sox. If one's happiness, as a fan or as anything else, needs miracles for realization, life's gonna be grim.
My regular golf partners are devout Sox fans (hey, we're all old). They are grumblers, as are most devout fans of all sports teams. During the July-August slide, their grumbling reached cicada noise levels and I felt the need to stage a brief intervention as we waited for the green to clear on a par-three.
"This Red Sox team," I said, "has given you far more than you expected and that's true no matter how the season ends."
To my surprise, they immediately agreed with me. Didn't end the grumbling of course (should've heard it after the last Yankee series), but on average the noise level declined to a buzz from 777 on the runway.
My August statement is my final word on the 2021 Red Sox, whether their postseason ends with a champagne shower or ends tonight.
Numbers Can Be More Eloquent Than Words, Even My Words
After four games of the 2021 NFL season, Patriots rookie quarterback Mac Jones is second in the league in passes completed, fourth in pass attempts, and seventh in completion percentage.
That's the good news. Jones has been given many chances to pass and has completed his share and then some. He has leapt the first hurdle of NFL quarterbacking.
Now for the less encouraging statistics, the ones which speak to a QB still inching up the start of his career curve.
Jones is T-24th in touchdown passes, and T-4th in interceptions. He's T-7th in sacks, 18th in passing yards per game, 26th in yards per pass attempts and 26th in overall passer rating. These numbers are not solely responsible for but are still directly related to the worst stat of all. The Patriots are 27th in the league in points scored.
Cold numbers say that Jones' NFL career is off to an acceptable start. And that's all they say. To say anything more means the speaker is desperate to pretend the Pats no longer miss Tom Brady. The numbers to express how wrong that is only exist in astronomy.
Wearing Rose-Colored Glasses At Night, In the Rain
The Patriots didn't get blown out by Tom Brady and the Buccaneers last night. Cue another week of looking for a bright future for the team by fans (who can be forgiven) and too many members of the Pats-takes-industrial complex (who should know better). A close loss to a better team can be spun to some extent, but too much spin on the delivery is bad in any sport.
Exhibit A: The Globe headline on Ben Volin's game analysis: "Even in a Patriots loss, Bill Belichick got the better of his matchup with Tom Brady." Oh, really? Why don't we ask Bill if he agrees. Go ahead, Ben. I'm sure you'll get an extensive answer.
Exhibit B: On NBC Sports Boston's postgame show very early this morning, Tom Curran had the audacity to say he was "going on to Houston (the Pats' next opponent)." The Brady era is over in New England, he said accurately. The panelists agreed that the Mac Jones era had now begun, an era of distinct promise. The interregnum is over and a return to future Pats' glory likely.
Any spin worth its salt is based on some facts. Brady did not excel against New England's defense, to put it mildly. His throws were often high and outside of their targets. Jones had an excellent game in miserable conditions. Tampa Bay's secondary was poor even before it became injury-riddled, but 19 straight completions is a splendid seven-on-seven drill in training camp, let alone in a real game.
And yet, and yet, the scoreboard still ended up Bucs 19-Patriots 17. It was far from the first game in Foxboro where Brady didn't exactly shine but still pulled off a close win. (I remember one famous one from way back. It was snowing.) This was just the first time he did it against New England. Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I just cannot believe that a close loss at home to a team that didn't play close to its best is a portent of happier days ahead.
Volin and Curran are fine reporters and anything but homers. My guess is their sunshiny analyses were in reaction to their pregame suspicions that the Bucs would indeed blow the Pats away by like 31-10 or so. Moist tropical air colliding with cooler air from the north made that impossible. It wasn't blowout weather last night. It was a night made for what happened, a disjointed but mighty tough game where hanging on to the ball was a signal triumph on any play, a night where Leonard Fournette and Jakobi Meyers were the most dynamic offense weapons for their team.
Most of all, it was the kind of night meant for a game that'd come down to one win-it-or-lose-it-here play. Facing fourth and three from the Tampa Bay 37, Belichick decided that he wanted that play made by kicker Nick Folk, a 56-yard field goal in the pouring rain. Folk didn't miss by much, but miss he did.
Belichick's decision to try the kick rather than go for the first down with a minute left had the analytics crowd shrieking in pain. Again, this might be just me, but it also hints that the coach has somewhat less confidence in his promising rookie QB than does Cris Collinsworth. When it came time to put the game on his best offensive weapon, Belichick chose Folk's foot over Jones' arm. That's unfair to Jones. It's more likely that Belichick has little confidence in his whole offense, not just Jones.
Nineteen straight completions is fantastic. But it is an individual performance that ought to translate into many more than 17 points no matter how foul the weather. Porous secondary and all, Tampa Bay had its BEST defensive performance of the young season. By a lot. They'd allowed at least 25 points in their three previous games.
Jones is leading an offense that is failing at its primary goal -- scoring. New England is averaging 17.8 points a game. That is 27th in the NFL. This wouldn't get it done in 1986, let alone 2021. There have been a variety of reasons for the disparity between Jones' decent but not more stats (very good in completion percentage, poor in yards per attempt) and the scoreboard, turnovers against Miami, the humiliating minus-one yard rushing last night, but a variety of reasons for failure means a team has multiple problems.
Problems and all, New England ought to win next week, because the Texans are barely an NFL franchise at this point. Then come the Jets again, and they've had their win for this month. The takes-industrial complex will be giddy at the .500 record. My reaction will be more measured.
New England is far from a bad team. OK does not equal "playoff contender." What the first month of the season has shown is that the Pats are a team that's lost the knack of winning in a league where well over a third of games are decided by two or three plays at the most. It's a hard knack to develop. Like most things that're hard to define and impossible to quantify, the knack of winning seems more inherent than learned behavior.
The guy that has had the knack to a higher degree than any player in football history showed once more what it looks like last night. Tom Brady had an average night for any NFL QB, let alone him, and his team still made the two-three plays that won the game.
When Mac Jones has an average game for a rookie QB and the Pats win a close one anyway, then and only then will the team be getting somewhere.
