Signature game to date of Drake Maye's career, most complete defenseman in NHL history, differences between college and NFL fans, sports fans and education, when announcers spoke the truth

Monday 12/22/25

Drake Maye had his signature game of the season last night, and with it the signature game of his young career. The Ravens aren't a good team, but this they had something to play for, they have two guys on offense who are going to Canton, the Patriots defense has a bunch of injuries, and this was a prime time Sunday night game on the road after the Pats had lost the week before to the Bills who had won earlier in the day. Another Patriots loss and the two teams would've had the same record atop the AFC East.

Maye had his first 300 yard game, which sounds surprising, but as I've said before in these pages, he was putting up the same stat line--high completion percentage, with about 270 yards--for a while. What's more, the Patriots trailed by eleven in the fourth quarter, and Maye took them back after struggling for much of the night.

That's a quality win and I thought Maye was the man when it mattered. You needed to see that type of thing from him and now you have. Patriots fans should be encouraged. Hopefully some guys return and the injuries don't hold them back. The Broncos lost to the Jaguars, which means Denver and New England have the same record but Denver owns the tiebreaker. And while I'm not saying I expect them to lose one of their two remaining games, but I think it's more likely that the Broncos do rather than the Patriots. I don't see New England losing to the Jets (on the road) and then Miami in New England January. Call it a twenty-five percent chance at the top seed.

The Bruins lost again. Back on Thursday, they would have moved into first place in their division with a win here in Boston over the Oilers, but they lost. Now, just a short time later, they find themselves not only out of the top three in their division, but out of a Wild Card position. That's how closely bunched everyone is. They took one out of a possible six points in that three games in four days stretch going back to the Edmonton game. All home games. Canadiens come to town tomorrow then it's off on a four-game road trip. Can't let it get away from you here.

Was strange seeing both college football playoff games and NFL games on Saturday. Seems messy to me. NFL talk is much more prominent on social media. I saw far more about the Bears-Packers game than the college games combined. What I've noticed is that college football fans--I mean the majority--tend to be in more rural areas--or less big-city areas, if you will--without a thriving assortment of pro franchises (across the sports, not just football). Often, they didn't go to college themselves, or not the school of the team they support. Politically this breaks down a certain way, too, which I don't think we need to spell out.

But take Patriots fans, just because I live here. What percentage of them are college football fans? I don't think it's a very high number. And sure, this is Massachusetts, where there's never much interest in college sports, given how dominant the big four professional teams are. But the same goes for cities like New York and Chicago. The urban centers.

Whereas, I think college football fans are likelier to be NFL fans than vice versa. That also speaks to what football means in the culture--for lack of a better word--of that football fan base in those areas and in the lives of those people, like it's this core precept of...well, freedom and America.

As it was, Tulane and JMU weren't competitive. It's strange when you look at the match-ups and see a top five team playing a team ranked twenty-four. As I said earlier, I get why these teams were selected. You're not really trying to pick the best twelve teams, just like the NCAA basketball tournament was never about the best 64 teams.

You're rewarding teams for winning conferences and having successful seasons, which is different than "We think school A can beat schools like B and C." Texas, for example, would have wiped the floor with either Tulane or JMU, but that's not how it's done and what the thinking is, after a certain point. When the bottom portion of the teams for the are being selected.

I get it, but those were two dogs of a game. Oregon didn't even play well against JMU and still hung 51 on them. You knew within minutes, meanwhile, of the Tulane-Ole Miss game that the Rebels were about to have themselves an easy afternoon. They didn't just score fast, but their guys were untouched. Wasn't anyone particularly close to them, which isn't something you see often with football at the top twenty-five level, never mind the playoff level.

The best player in the NHL, Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar, had one of his prototypical goal-and-two-assists last night. Earlier this month I'd mentioned a project being done on a hockey history discussion forum to try and determine the best eighty defenseman in hockey history, while sharing my top-five.

I was curious to see where Makar would land at this still-early stage of his career, and turns out it was at spot number eighteen. This feels about right to me. Obviously he can move way up in the years going forward. He's already a Hall of Famer if he walked away now. He could win five Norris trophies. He's at two now and on track for another this year. Could he crack the top five? Tall order, but this is the kind of start you'd need.

Who is the most complete defenseman in NHL history? This doesn't necessarily mean the best (I'd have this player as the fourth best defenseman ever), but rather the player who did the most the best. Defend, skate, pass, score, has an arsenal of shots including the big slapper, plays with toughness, plays with finesse, throws thundering hits. To me, the most complete defenseman in NHL history is Denis Potvin.

I really like the 1976 Patriots. They were a young, feisty, athletic team on the rise, that was also good enough to win the Super Bowl that year, and may have done just that, barring a bad call in the playoffs against the Raiders, which I'm sure some Patriots fans thought about after the so-called Tuck Rule call in the Snow Bowl in the 2001 playoffs when Tom Brady and company beat the Raiders on their way to a championship. I think the people who know who Patriots quarterback Steve Grogan is now think of as this always older QB with a big neck guard.

Here's the thing with life: People usually have no clue about anything that happens before they're there. Before their time. What do I mean by their time? When they were of an age to start paying some degree of attention, even if they do so in a sloppy, slipshod fashion. I've never been this way. Obviously.

The 1976 Patriots were before my time, the same as the 1972 Grateful Dead or 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald or Gunsmoke in 1951 and the Civil War and so on. Things I know great amounts about and which I write about. I go where the interesting things are. I was that way in fourth grade. If you looked at what I read--the things I chose to read on my own, I mean--and what I watched, and chose to learn about, you'd have known this. Abundantly. I don't think anything should be before your time, in a sense. You might not have been around, but that doesn't mean you're not free to know as best you can.

People who like sports tend to be less educated. Which is saying something, considered how uneducated almost everyone is. I'm not talking about school now and universities. That's not education. That's going somewhere. Learning and knowledge is different and isn't proven by a slip of paper because of where you sat for a bunch of hours over several years.

Having said that, people who care about sports history tend to be more educated. They're often better read than, say, professors. At least in their "field," as it were, which is sports history. But that person will typically know more about, say, 1930s baseball than the poetry professor at Harvard will know about Arthur Rimbaud.

Passion motivates the former; it's often about other things for the latter that have little to do with passion and a veritable need to learn more. I've seen things on hockey history discussion forums, for instance, indicative of levels of knowledge way beyond the many, many, many people I've known and dealt with in academia, and which is expressed in much more proficient language, too. You might be surprised. I'm not. And I'd say that even if I hadn't born witness to these truths over quite a few years.

I watch a lot of games from the past going back as early as they're available. I listen to a lot of baseball games of the past from surviving broadcast tapes. I read, I think, I try to ascertain. Whereas, most simply fire their words from straight out of their ass and we end up with all of these statements sourced from an ostensibly bottomless well of ignorance and narcissism.

"So and so is the GOAT!" says the person who has no clue about anyone who existed prior to them turning fifteen. Nor are they getting inside any numbers. In the rare instances when the cite a number, it'll be a big, lumpy one--like WAR in baseball--which isn't of much value on its own, and instead works in conjunction with other numbers. A kind of statistical nuance. People don't do nuance. They usually don't know what the word means.

These people will say "literally" at every opportunity, as though it were akin to the pressing of a magic button that automatically makes them correct and does all the work of building an argument for them by removing the need to have a cogent argument or the merest clue of what they're talking about. You'll see the word "objectively" used the same word. "They're objectively the best team ever."

Anyway, the 1976 Patriots are one of the great "what if" teams of Boston sports history, despite being mostly only about now by people who were...that's right, of a certain age at the time. Over the weekend I was watching their Monday Night Football game against the Jets from October 18 of that season.

Joe Namath was still the Jets' quarterback, which I bet would surprise most people. Namath's career is crystalized by and in that Super Bowl-winning season of 1969 like no other football Hall of Famer's is encapsulated (and in some ways, represented) by a single season. The flair of Namath's guarantee has much to with that, as well as the perception at the time that an AFL team would necessarily be crushed by its NFL adversary.

People have never really questioned whether Namath should be in the Hall of Fame--or not until recent years, anyway, when someone who doesn't have a clue posts some Namath stats that they stumbled across from someone else and we see the low completion percentage and QB rating, with that person--and all the people who "agree" with that person--saying Namath sucked, etc., because they're not smart or educated enough to understand that it was a different game at the time, and you always have to adjust for era.

When you play and what was happening at the time is a huge factor with evaluating players historically. Unless you think Caleb Williams is much better than prime John Elway, or 2025 Drake Maye is pretty much where 1984 Dan Marino was. Playing quarterback in 2025 isn't like playing quarterback in 2003 or 1985 or 1970. Just like hitting in 2000 wasn't like hitting in 1976 or hitting in 1969 wasn't like hitting in 1930 or putting up numbers in the NHL in 1981-82 wasn't like putting up numbers in 1999-00.

The truth has always had a hard road, of sorts, in human history. Nothing is more powerful than the truth, but the truth has never been much liked. People have always wanted to live to lies, because they feel--and that's the key word, "feel," not "think"--that that's easier. And now, it's like no one wants any truth at all, and are less equipped than ever before to face truth, accept truth, and respond accordingly. You need to be strong. Brave. Make changes. Accept that you might not be this as you try to determine how to best become that. You need the time and space to reflect and think through what needs thinking through. That means taking the care to do this decided-upon action--because it is something you decide on--and being present. Dealing with hard things sometimes. Paying a kind of price for today to be better for later.

It's sort of like with weight loss, but much more serious. You know what I think when I see someone like, say, Josh McDaniels, who has lost weight? I think they took Ozempic. I don't think they ran stairs and changed their diet and lifestyle. Or started going to the gym. And I'm sure that's usually the case. Truth is running the stairs and making the changes for the right and necessary reasons. It's isn't easy. It becomes easier, but that's after you fight through at the start and sometimes for a long while.

If you're clued in, if you're aware, you'll notice how truth is scaled back everywhere in our society, such that a sighting of the truth counts as a bona fide rarity. Almost like a spectacle. Which people then recoil from or attempt to castigate, but only after they've gathered their numbers, because virtually no one here in late December 2025 is enough of an individual to ever act on their own.

Listen to how anodyne a football broadcast now is. Or any national broadcast. Sometimes, you'll get a bit more with local baseball, basketball, and hockey broadcasts. But every NFL broadcast has national announcers. It's like not there's a Patriots TV analogue for the likes of a Jack Edwards.

Those analysts will tell you what's happening and why, with varying degrees of skill and efficiency of presentation, but they pretty much won't ever say what something is when it's critical. Specifically critical. They'll couch the language in generalities, or not cite the player himself, but rather the defense as a whole.

There's this interesting moment in the MNF broadcast of the Patriots and Jets where Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Alex Karras talk about how Namath doesn't get much on the ball because he only throws with his arm and his upper half, rather than with his legs like he used to. This is after a completion, too. The mention how the ball wobbles and hangs up in the air.

You wouldn't hear this now. It wasn't something that would have been said about Mac Jones. Like it'd be "mean" these days, in a world where people are, ironically, meaner than perhaps ever because of how broken and stunted they tend to be, and how projection is the name of the get-them-before-they-get-you game. A different kind of sport.