Current sports: The scourge of gambling, broken people, cluelessness, why the Patriots can win the Super Bowl, casual "experts," how a bad team may be an important team, the deserving AL MVP

Sunday 11/16/25

The Patriots can win the Super Bowl this year.

Wait, what? I'm the one saying this? Mr. Very Critical of the Patriots?

I am!

Every team in the league is flawed and suspect. The league lacks for iron.

The recipe for winning at present is the quarterback, limiting your mistakes, and being "good" by letting the other team make more mistakes than you that play a large or significantly costly role in their own defeat. Those mistakes, coupled with decisive plays by your quarterback, add up to today's preeminent formula for winning.

I wouldn't say this is particularly exciting, one team "out bad-ing" the other, but hey, that's what a lot of this comes down to right now.

The Patriots could also be dispatched in their first playoff game. But even if that were the case, I think this season has been a real achievement. To have nine wins on November 16 is a big deal for the franchise. Nine wins at the end of the season would have been pretty good considering what the team has been for so long, and don't be fooled thinking it was just the last two years. They've been a bad team heading nowhere since 2020, and you shouldn't also be fooled by 2021, which I knew people would be.

Shall I put a somewhat guessed/somewhat reasoned percentage on the chances of these Patriots winning the Super Bowl? Okay--eight percent. I know he's a top two or three pick for MVP thus far, but the quarterback has to continue to improve. There's considerable tightening that can be done. He plays too loose, takes too many hits, fumbles too easily.

Having said the above, it's disheartening how the only conversation you hear about sports here in Boston and in wretched Boston sports media is about the Patriots, outside of the niche sectors in the margins where the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics fans are.

But it's almost like those teams aren't mainstream, which sounds like a strange notion, given the packed arenas and the raw numbers of fans, but compared to football it's nothing. That's because as we get stupider, football becomes more popular. It's the stupid person's sport. Whereas, baseball is more of a thinking person's sport. You have to understand hockey. Football? Nah. Football also means copious eating and drinking, and we are a morbidly obese people who like little more than stuffing and dumping stuff down our gullets while sitting for extended periods of time on our capacious asses.

The Red Sox used to be the kings of Boston sports. I guess they're second now, but it's a most distant second. It's odd when you think about it that basketball isn't more popular. The Bruins used to be briefly the kings of Boston sports--they had a run in the 1970s--and considering what a hot bed for hockey talent that New England is, you'd also think the Bruins would be more popular, but no. Again, I think it's our collective stupidity.

I thought last night was a pretty good test for the Bruins. They had their seven-game win streak snapped the other night and then it was on to playing the Canadiens in Montreal, a game which the Bruins won 3-2 after going seven for seven on the penalty kill. You can't be giving up seven power play opportunities.

Something that should be a bigger story line which everyone seems to be missing: Will the Kansas City Chiefs make the playoffs this year? People just assume they'll get it together when they need to, stomp teams and advance, and get to the AFC title game, but it's looking rather iffy and trending to doubtful to me.

This afternoon's game is a big one for 5-4 Kansas City, with them taking on the 8-2 Broncos in Denver. Then they have the Colts at home, Dallas on the road, they have a game against the Chargers still on the schedule, and Denver again. You think they're getting in? Right now, it's looking like they won't.

Have you noticed when you go to the NFL's website that the standings aren't front and center? They can be tricky to find at first. That's because teams don't matter--it's all about the fantasy football. Individual players (and, concomitantly, their stats) are foregrounded, pushed.

Remember the Ravens' start? They can pass Pittsburgh. I'd give that better than fifty-fifty odds.

It's interesting that Matthew Stafford is having the year of his life in his age thirty-seven season. He's been the best player in the league so far this year, but I think Drake Maye has been more valuable. This is a degree of nuance that no one can comprehend anymore, because they don't know what any words actually mean, nor are they going to make any effort--they won't tax a single brain cell--to think about anything they feel don't have to think about.

Alabama rebounded from what one can now see was a bad loss against a weak Florida State team to put themselves in a position to make the playoff, only to lose to Oklahoma yesterday. I guess a two-loss Bama team could still make it. They'd stand a decent shot if they win out.

I saw this argument in a college football comments section, with this guy making like he possessed football knowledge beyond everyone else, and knew when to go for it on fourth down and when not to in each and every instance, and finally, as what he clearly felt was the last word that needed to be said about the depth of this expertise of his, he wrote, "And I gamble a lot on football."

People are such idiotic jackasses.

Some exasperated other person responded, "K. Good luck on Fan Duel tomorrow," and the brilliant football mind rejoined, "Can't argue with facts," because there may very well be no one else on planet earth besides myself who 1. Knows and 2. Actually cares what a fact is. I think I could ask anyone to define what a fact is and they couldn't do it. Further, if I asked them for an example of a fact, I bet they'd get that wrong in almost every instance. People think "fact" means "this thing is true," which is not what a fact is.

I find it alarming how often people will say that a team winning a championship constituted the best day of their life. They're not being fanciful. It's not casual language. They mean this literally.

Look...you've gone way wrong in life if something like that is true for you. I say this as someone with a horrible life that is nothing but pain, aloneness, the suffering of discrimination, where it is hard to think of a single reason to live. But I know what is worth living for, I know what is important, and I am trying to have and get to what I know is important.

Sports aren't important. Someone else's stuff is someone else's stuff, and by stuff, I mean the accomplishments of their lives. It's not your stuff. You cannot glom on. You can't live vicariously. And you have to live your life in the midst of, and/or the pursuit of, that which is truly important. You've gone wrong if a sports team winning something is what you consider your life's high point, even if you feel like you haven't had highs.

The gambling and how it's practically hidden in plain view--because there isn't much mainstream discussion about how truly fucked up sports gambling is--numbers among the many things that ought to blow my mind with how they're countenanced in society, but don't, because society is so fucked right now and people aren't smart enough to realize how fucked, and lack the language skills to articulate how fucked it is, and lack any of the necessary tools to do the things at both the individual and communal levels to make society less fucked.

I am convinced that gambling is destroying more lives than it ever has right now, just as I am convinced that more people have substance abuse issues--the result of self-medicating their loneliness, brokenness, lack of hope, and isolation--than ever before, by which I mean, in the whole of human history.

The numerical bombardment of analytics gives people a confidence in their sports prognosticating abilities and knowledge that is baseless. People are so simple now that they think--they believe--that by spitting out a given word (note all of the morons so proud of themselves for saying "inflection point" for the umpteenth time) or the name of some abstruse stat whose derivation they don't understand, that they're the smartest person in any room, including if they were to attend a massive convention of sports fans. Who is going to step in and reveal that person to themselves as a moron? There are only morons now, pretty much. The slide to the bottom is well greased with...well, pick your lubricant of choice.

I'm reminded somewhat of the episode "Let Me Count the Ways" from the brilliant first season of Cheers, in which Sam and Coach make a bet that the Celtics will lose, thanks to a tip they received from Marshall, a professor of cybernetics at MIT, who has noticed with the help of his computer--or thinks he has--a correlation between activity in the Van Allen radiation belts and Celtics losses.

I've no doubt it's routinely ripping apart families, turning debt into overwhelming debt, making lonely people spiral more than they already were spiraling. But it's like this thing that no one talks about, save for the periodic story about athletes rigging plays, which I believe is also widespread now, you just don't know it.

I was never someone who thought that games or parts of games were fixed. Typically, that was just the pissing and moaning of people whose team lost. I don't think you can automatically trust anything now, though, in a game. Well, not anything. But it all has an asterisk built into at this point as far as I'm concerned.

Everything in our world gets worse. Everything. That is the nature of now.

Saw a quote from David Ortiz that I thought was spot on, in which he said the Red Sox need two guys in their line-up--especially in the AL East--who hit thirty homers and drive in 100 runs, and I am totally with him on that. That's what you need to be a serious contender. You need big bats. A couple power bats for Fenway. The Red Sox don't have anyone like this right now. You can say Roman Anthony, but you don't know that. You don't know what kind of power he has or hasn't.

I've encountered much griping about Cal Raleigh losing out on the AL MVP award to Aaron Judge. One comment I saw got to the heart of that matter effectively. The person said that people who think this was some miscarriage of voting justice are people who have no clue about baseball.

That would be true. You can't win an MVP hitting .247. Judge's stats crushed Raleigh's. Destroyed them. Raleigh's OPS+ wasn't even 1.000, for all of those home runs. Because all Raleigh does is hit home runs. That's his whole game, his whole thing. Home runs--especially 60 of them--make for a mouthwatering narrative to what is now called "the casual," as in fan.

But you know what? People who spend more time watching sports than they do anything else but working--maybe--and sleeping--people sleep a ton because so many of them are depressed--are "casuals," because they're ignorant in this as they are in everything else. How would you not be? By thinking? People don't think. By reading? People don't read. By learning? People don't learn. By observing? People have no clue what is going on in front of them. By recognizing and understanding nuance and gradations? Don't make me laugh.

Which isn't to say that Raleigh didn't have a case. But the MVP award is now given out to who is deemed the best player, not the most valuable, necessarily. Can you argue that Raleigh was more valuable to his team than Judge was to his, especially being a catcher and all? Sure. "Valuable" isn't just on the field. You can be a valuable leader. And that's part of the game, too. I feel like I've just blown minds with that, because I know that no one would think that had anything to do with the concept of MVP, but it obviously makes perfect sense if, again, you know what the word "valuable" actually means.

Roger Maris is one of my all-time favorite players, but there's a reason why his 1961 has never been discussed seriously as one of the best seasons in baseball history by people who know their stuff at all. At no point. I don't just mean now amongst baseball historians, of which there are some, though they're dying off. There's a novelty aspect to a season that is...monophonic, in terms of being just about the home run total. It's cool, it has a narrative component, but it's still different than being a great hitter or an all-time great or having an all-time great offensive season or even the best offensive season in the league that year.

I watched most of the BC-Georgia Tech game yesterday, which BC led by 11 in the fourth quarter, before losing. What I'll say about this is that BC fought hard. They're the worst team in the ACC and one of the three worst in the entire country in FBS. George Tech had everything to play for--the ACC championship, a spot in the playoff, and BC nearly wrecked it all for them. If the game was four seconds longer--so that BC could have ran one more play to get into field goal range, and then tried a kick--the Eagles might have won.

This game, coupled with the Notre Dame game, gave me a little encouragement for next season. People are saying that any decent player BC has will transfer once the year is over, but I'm not so sure about that. I think if you're there at BC, you're not going to show up and shine so brightly somewhere else. Maybe you buy in to the program, if anything is being assembled program-wise. I don't know. Again, I saw some fight, and usually that's a good sign, program-wise. Even when you suck.

I was also surprised that people stuck it out to the end of the game. BC fans--and students especially--are known for bailing early. I do it when I go, but I am there alone, it's hard for me, and I have things to get to. The attendance was decent, the crowd pumped, relatively speaking. There were a bunch of big chunk plays by BC. Of course, Georgia Tech gashed them for over 600 yards of total offense. I wasn't impressed with the Yellow Jackets, a couple of explosive players aside. Porous defense.

But yeah, BC came to play against a ranked opponent again and were in the game late and later than they were against the Fighting Irish. I also liked that when Georgia Tech came back and went ahead in the fourth, that BC went right down the field and reclaimed the lead.

I'm not saying this is the case for BC--my goodness that's not what I'm saying--but sometimes, teams that become successful almost owe a debt of gratitude to the players who stuck around and tried to build something while they team or teams they were on sucked. It's possible to have an awful record and be making a kind of progress.

Let's say I write a story and I scrap it as I'm writing it. I say, "Yeah, no, this isn't the thing," but out of that story, I make two different stories that are both the thing and are great. This is happening right now. So that first effort was important. Even though it's not going to be a thing beyond that.