Wednesday 7/31/24
This is about the earliest you can say this, being the final day of July, but my expectation for the 2024 Patriots is that they will be a disaster and perhaps the worst team in the NFL. This is me entering that thought in the record. As with the Red Sox and them making the postseason, I'd prefer to be wrong and, better yet, very wrong.
Matthew Judon is a pain in the ass. Guy bitches about his contract--which he signed--shows up his coach at practice, then tries to portray himself as a hero after by saying he's going to man up and all of that nonsense that dumb guys of a certain Neanderthal ilk favor and honor his contract. Wow--what a great and mature person you are. And, because people are idiots, they then posted thousands and thousands of things about all of the admiration they have for this guy, how he does it the right way, all of that.
Does anyone ever get anything right? I know that virtually no one can do anything right, let alone do it well, but can anyone get anything right?
Does anyone in the NFL disappear over the course of a season like Matthew Judon does? If it's not September, do you notice him? Maybe some in October. But he's gone by November, right? Mr. It's Still Technically Summer out there on the field. Then you bitch and disrupt and follow-up the bitching and disrupting with some moral peacocking?
Just because something and someone fools meatheads doesn't mean that something and that someone ever should fool anyone.
Christian Barmore has blood clots and is done for the indefinite future and maybe for good. He was one of your only players. Now he's gone.
I made the mistake of putting on sports radio for a few minutes the other day, and the idiot hosts were trying to do some fake drama bullshit because someone reported from camp that quarterback Drake Maye isn't anywhere close--like four days into camp--to where Mac Jones was at this point of his rookie camp.
First of all, I don't think Drake Maye is ever going to be any good. Again, maybe I'm wrong. You never know until you do. Guys take to different things differently. The league, styles. Guys put in different amounts of effort, have different amounts of dedication, some rise to challenges, some wither at challenges, some thrive with challenges. Chances are, no matter where you're drafted, you won't be very good. And you won't last long. The quarterback position is certainly no different.
I didn't think much of Maye in college. My sense was the Patriots were going to pick a quarterback no matter what to try and bail themselves out and create some buzz, and that's not an effective rebuild strategy. What you end up doing when you do that is adding more years to the rebuild because in three years you're starting all over again, in essence. Which is what I expect to happen with the Patriots.
But let's be fair. The best that Mac Jones was ever going to look, in his NFL life, was in that first training camp when he knew the system, and his competition was Cam Newton, dumb quarterback who could never throw that well, and couldn't throw at all by then. At that point, Newton was just a big guy who could sometimes run into someone and pick up a few yards. That was the apex of Mac Jones: when he knew that system and Cam Newton was the contrast. That was as good as Mac Jones was ever going to look.
Mac Jones didn't--and doesn't--have the physical ability to be an NFL quarterback. He has perhaps the weakest arm I've ever seen at that level. His mental acumen was touted, but the truth was, he simply had taken the class before, if you will--he had some experience in the system. He wasn't expertly processing anything on the field, switching out of one play to get into another that would bring better results, then delivering those results. Again, he was like a kid who'd taken the class before. That wears off. Then he became a mental wreck, because he's mentally weak. That got worse and worse, until he couldn't do anything.
It doesn't matter that Drake Maye doesn't look as polished as Mac Jones did in his first week of training camp. What's the absolute best case scenario with Maye? Something Josh Allen-like? Josh Allen-lite? Let training camp play out. See where he's at. Patriots fans will not want to hear this, but this is a player who might not be good, if he's going to be good, until the late 2020s. But again, you never know: maybe he progresses fast, wins the starting job in camp, throws for 4000 yards in his rookie year and the Patriots win 10 games. Practically nothing in sports shocks me, but I'd be very surprised.
A problem that people are not making enough about is that the likely starter, in Jacoby Brissett, is so weak. It's hard to have a guy you drafted as the third overall pick sitting on the bench when the guy playing in front of him is bad. This works so much better when you have someone good in there, or, at least, serviceable. I don't think Brissett is really even the latter at this point, if he ever was. So do you just leave someone in to perform badly? How long can that last? Maybe Brissett will be mediocre? What's his ceiling? With a rookie coach, this lackluster offensive coordinator who no one has ever really wanted before? What are the chances that he could be good? So then are you just committed to being pummeled all year? Sticking to some plan while getting it handed to you every week? Then people start talking about tanking, and that's never what you want.
I get that this isn't cheery. People will often have this attitude that anything one says about a team--and a team one supports and that they support--has to be rah-rah and what not, and that people not from here enjoy saying that New Englanders are so negative, etc. I always try to deal in what I think things actually are and process--and sometimes put out there--why they are that way. I'm responding to something else, rather than acting on anything I'm bringing in with me.
It's funny: last summer, around this time, I was talking to someone who said to me that they thought at the least that the Patriots 2023 season would be really interesting. I said I didn't think that at all, that it would be as blah a Patriots season as there had ever been. That they were going to be a bad team, and a boring bad team. Recently I was with this person again, and they said the same thing about this year's team! It was funny because I know they had no recollection of saying what they did last summer. They want it to be a good year. They want to look forward to it, and probably cling to that idea as long as they can, before the Patriots make them give it up entirely.
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