Division likeliest to produce Super Bowl champion, the rich man's Dan Fouts, the perfectly reasonable FBS playoff selections, encouraging Celtics, the end of the Chiefs, Hall of Famer Jeff Kent

Tuesday 12/9/25

People who talk about the teams they root for in the first person plural are likelier to be obtuse. There's no risk in saying this--true as it is, too--because they're unlikely to know what it means. What, for example, can a person like this

Forget the bama talk how does Ohio state loose and drop 1 spot. We loose by the same amount in 2023 and we drop 4 spots. Make it make since.

know about anything, realistically speaking? Average American right there.

I have a developing feeling--though it could pass as soon as it's arisen--that the Super Bowl champion comes out of the AFC East this year. You watch these NFL games and you know that there are less obstacles than there might be, or perhaps should be. Each week, you have more reasons to doubt another team you think of as a viable contender. I'd mentioned earlier that the Bills may have dipped at just the right time. Don't be surprised if it's them this year.

Or the Patriots. Having said the above about the Bills, they could have been in some trouble if they didn't pull out that game on Sunday, which they wouldn't have without a lot of help from the Bengals.

In an earlier entry with some sports-related predictions, I put Drake Maye down for one career Super Bowl win. I should clarify--one Super Bowl win in the meat of his career, when it's fully up and running. So, one win after last year and after this year (which is year two, with a new coach and offensive coordinator, too). But if he "steals" one this year--which he and the Patriots could--then I think he gets another later on as well.

He'll probably finish second in MVP voting this season. He's just a tick behind Matthew Stafford. I think Maye has been more valuable to his team. But Stafford's numbers are ever-so-slightly better and he has narrative--he's been a productive player for so long, and now it's time for a career-capping individual honor--on his side. This Sunday's Patriots-Bills game in Foxborough should be a most interesting and probably entertaining one.

Stafford's career, post-career, will age well, allowing that there's anyone around capable of understanding aspects of football history, which is doubtful in a world where virtually no one knows anything, looks into anything, ponders anything, and fewer and fewer people are capable of doing so if they even wanted to. He's the rich man's Dan Fouts, which is a pretty big compliment, because Fouts was excellent himself. They both have big numbers, but Stafford has put up bigger numbers for much longer than Fouts did, and he has a Super Bowl victory with the possibility of another.

I think people like to complain because it gives them something to talk about and they have a hard time thinking of anything otherwise. The college football playoff bracket was announced the other day. I don't see anything strange here. It all makes sense to me. The way others have been going on and on about it, though, you'd think some great miscarriage of justice had occurred that defiled the very concept of credulity.

The committee is trying to do a few things. It is motivated by wanting a balance of the best teams and the most deserving teams, as well as playing to certain bases and regions--which means conferences, specifically the SEC--for dollar reasons. It's not the twelve best teams. How many teams are in the NCAA basketball tournament now? Whatever that number is, those aren't the sixty-odd actually best teams. Many teams better than teams in that tournament aren't included.

Of course there are football teams left out of this field of twelve that are better than a handful of the teams that got in. But it's logical that JMU and Tulane made it. They deserved to based on their seasons. Vanderbilt and Texas are better, I think, than both. People aren't making that much of the latter being excluded, which is mildly surprising to me. I think they could have been a dangerous foe, despite what I've written here about Arch Manning. Actually, Vanderbilt could have done some damage, too.

For me, Alabama played themselves out of a berth with their showing in the SEC Championship Game on Saturday. They weren't competitive. But I get why they were included and why Notre Dame wasn't. Notre Dame doesn't play anyone. I thought they deserved to go instead of Alabama because I don't have much reason to think that Alabama can do much in this playoff.

Notre Dame, in my view, had more of a shot to make a little noise. But at least Alabama beat some quality teams this year. Notre Dame had all of this games against teams in a weak ACC. I get that Notre Dame wants to be independent. Feels like they should be independent. Notre Dame is its own kind of thing; it's not really an in-conference thing. But hey, live by the independent sword, die by the independent sword.

Notre Dame's 2026 schedule looks to be even softer, with only three road games to boot. They could lose a single game next season and be left out of the playoff. They probably wouldn't be, but you can already see the possibility.

As for Notre Dame then declining to play in a bowl...people, being as simple and stupid as they are, took that one of two ways. Either, "Yeah fuck them good for you!" or "What crybabies!"

Not surprisingly, I don't hold with either view. To me, you go to the bowl. Players who are moving on to the draft--this coming draft--will sit out. Okay. Other guys who wouldn't have played now play. Experience. You also get the additional weeks of practice. That's for next year. Building for next year.

This stuff is mandated. You're only allowed to be out there so much. Why would you not take advantage of more available practice time? If a redshirt has to play in the bowl game, they don't lose a year of eligibility. So get 'em started on next year now. If you get smoked in the game, who cares? You're building for next year. Take the time, make the most of the practices, get some guys some experience, take a trip, have a good time.

Then you have geniuses on social media who are like, "Yeah the Irish should come down to Tennessee and have a bowl game with the Vols I'd go."

The fantasy world of utter imbecility that so many people now live in. I ask myself, "How are these adults?"

Isn't it baffling that people spend so much of their lives watching sports and yet not know the rudiments about any sport? In the here and now. In how the game is played. How a league works. I'm not even talking the history of that sport in all of its rich nuance. There are a lot of people--guys especially--for whom watching sports is the thing they spend the third most amount of time doing after sleeping and working. And I bet there are some guys who manage to make it number one or two. Healthy. And this is typical of how they'll think and express themselves:

Notre Dame has not won a football Championship since 1988, are they even Relevant anymore !!

It's impressive when you have as many grammatical errors as you do words in the thing you've written. This is a person who doesn't know what a sentence is. You see this often. A person writes what would be a sentence, doesn't realize it's a sentence, then keeps going with more words, thinking in the end they've written a sentence because they put a period after all of it. But good thinking, man. That's using the old noggin. And right below that, you have someone writing, "Asshat says what." These are the adults of your community. These are the people all around you.

You have to be pleased with how the Celtics' season is going. They're the winners of five in a row and are third in the Eastern Conference. Most would likely say that's overachieving. Not I. Weak conference, and I thought the Celtics could be in the top four if they made their minds up organizationally not to treat this as a necessarily fallow year.

You can get Tatum back and get to the Finals. Some not-great team is going to come out of the East, because there aren't any great teams in the East. There's one team in the whole league that's better than everyone else, and that's Oklahoma City. Then you have ten, twelve other teams that could beat enough of those other teams to be the second best team.

What will Tatum be able to do when he comes back? Will he be ninety of what he was? Eighty-percent? How consistent will he be able to be? That'll be huge. Often a great player who comes back after a long time away will be himself one night, and then shoot 3-for-17 the next and turn it over six times.

I feel like the Chiefs have come to their end. Their part in the NFL's history book is over. I said before anyone else did that Patrick Mahomes isn't that good anymore. I've been saying this since 2023. The last time he was the player that people believe he is was in 2022. He was about as bad as a quarterback can be on Sunday night against the Texans. 14-for-33 for 160 yards with three interceptions and two sacks.

But you know what number stood out the most to me? It's the 4.85 yard average. You rarely see that from anybody. Not a number that low. That also tells me that Andy Reid, for all of the credit he gets as an offensive mastermind, can't scheme up anything right now to help his team move the ball.

The Chiefs make what the Patriots did for twenty years look all the more impressive. To me, those twenty years represent the greatest achievement in the history of American sports. You can talk about the Canadiens winning all of those Stanley Cups, but I bet if you did so, you'd have no clue as to the competitive advantages they had over other teams in the league. The Canadiens bought up an entire league so they could secure the services of Jean Beliveau. The Yankees also had big time advantages. Remember, teams basically owned players for good. You didn't have free agency.

The Patriots shouldn't have been able to do what they did for five years, let alone twenty. It's not the Super Bowls, either, that are the main thing. I know, that sounds perverse probably to many. It's that they were always right there. Year in, year out. Twenty years of that is more impressive than six Super Bowls.

The six Super Bowls were a result of always being right there. Then it's a numbers game. You'll win some, you'll lose some. Breaks, bounces, that kind of thing. (And Bill Belichick's self-sabotaging decision to bench Malcolm Butler, an early sign that New England's King Lear was in cognitive decline.)

When Tom Brady was the age that Patrick Mahomes is now, he was just getting started. Mahomes may already have a good start on being finished. We'll see. He'll need to redouble his commitment to the game. Train differently, get on a different mental and physical track. My feeling is that that's not who he is. I don't think he's driven like that. Certainly not like Brady was. As I said here, Mahomes is never going to push Brady for that spot at the very top of the sport. It's likely that no one ever will. Brady was just too many things.

I saw a post on social media this morning in which someone asked if Jalen Hurts as still a top five quarterback. He was never close to being a top five quarterback. Again: No matter how often I see the evidence, no matter how well I understand the norm and what people now are, I still can't get over how dumb and simple just about everyone is. So incapable of any discernment whatsoever.

The Texans could perhaps make some playoff noise based on their defense.

Jeff Kent finally got the call from the baseball Hall of Fame and an oversight has been redressed. Kent is a player who should have been elected on his second, third, or fourth time on the ballot rather than needing one of these veterans committees, but at least they got it right.

But, again, people being stupid and simple, they believe that Kent wasn't deserving, with many of them saying it's a travesty, etc., that Don Mattingly wasn't elected.

I should confess to being a little slow myself. You see, for me it's inconceivable to open my mouth and just start talking out of my ass. That's beyond me. It's not a behavioral option for me. I can only speak with expertise and credibility. I can wonder aloud; theorize. But I can't speak as if I know something if I don't. Further, if I don't know that thing better than anyone else does. And I could never try to pass myself off as someone who knew when he didn't and was just talking out of his ass.

It blows me away the conviction with which people will behave as i they were the end all be all leading authority on a subject. On every subject. No shame, no embarrassment. And why would you be ashamed? People don't have standards within themselves that they hold themselves to. And there's no one to embarrass them as the moron that they are, because everyone else is also a moron. No one can tell what anything is, including how stupid they are and the people on all sides of them are. It's all just one shade of stupidity and bullshit.

I now realize that when people say something like, "It's a travesty that Jeff Kent is a Hall of Famer and Don Mattingly isn't"--realize, I've rendered that in English; if I was faithfully recreating how people write, most of those words would be misspelled, there wouldn't be a complete sentences, there would be some emojis, a lol, and random capitalization--they've never once in their lives consulted the numbers. They wouldn't think to, they wouldn't even know how to. It's a wonder that people can wipe their own asses. Really. I think a time will come when they won't be able to figure it out. Could be this century.

That person was just a fan of Mattingly's in 1985 or their dad talks about him. And I've been slow to see this. Because it's just so foreign to me. Such a crazy way to be. And if such a person somehow saw the numbers on baseball-reference--like if you made them sit down with you and you pulled that player's page up for them--I don't think they'd know what any of it meant. But it doesn't stop them from acting like they're the ultimate expert on baseball history. Or the Beatles. Or writing. Picasso. Within the same day.

Jeff Kent was better than Joe Gordon and Bobby Doerr, themselves formidable slugging second basemen. He was an offensive force at that position, an RBI machine (he had eight 100 RBI seasons), a doubles machine, a thirty homer guy, MVP, and a high average batting average guy. He hit .334 once. Superstar. Sustained superstar.

The press didn't like him. If he'd been a media favorite, he'd have gone in perhaps on the first ballot. Mattingly was good for a few years. He's not close to being a Hall of Famer player. Nowhere close. You have to look at the actual numbers. Season by season and career. Carlos Delgado should also be in the Hall of Fame, and it may bode well for him that he received the second most votes after Kent.