Notes on the Patriots' win over the Texans and some life things

Monday 1/19/26

The Patriots defeated the Texans yesterday, which was good, but I didn't think the Patriots were all that good. Houston turned the ball over a lot. The Patriots turned the ball over a lot. And it could have been more, minus their own fumbles that they recovered. Would the Patriots have won if Houston shaved off two of those turnovers? I don't know.

The Patriots won in large part because of how bad C.J. Stroud was. As I mentioned the other day, he's gotten worse since his rookie year. It wasn't just the interceptions--one of which was an infield pop-up that the Pats returned for a touchdown--but how he got to a point in the first half where he couldn't throw the ball. The game was that much in his head.

Houston was getting to the point where they needed to make a change, and if they had, I think they could have won. Maybe. As a Pats fan, I was glad they didn't. Stroud was better at halftime, and the decision looked okay. And were it not for some key plays at key times by New England--improbable plays--that game could have been much closer on the scoreboard or gone to OT.

Other thoughts:

Drake Maye: Not good. I expected more from him. He needs to have better pocket awareness. He puts the ball on the ground a lot. Doesn't sense pressure from behind as well as he should.

But here's the thing: He made the key, clutch money throws that went along way in ensuring victory. They started rolling him out more as the game went along, which freed up some space and time for him to set and deliver the ball to spots where it needed to be. I don't know why they held back with the bootlegs as long as they did.

Having said that, I didn't think much of the vaunted Texans defense. That's some amazing unit? Not it's not. The Patriots defense was more impressive to me. The Pats D also generated more pressure on Stroud than the Texans D did on Maye.

Will Campbell: Problem. Pats fans want to love this guy, and all season long they've been preemptively giving his game credit that his game isn't due. He gets torched a few times a game, and those torchings resulted in fumbles yesterday. Granted, he recovered two fumbles himself--he cares, he hustles, sticks his nose in there, has awareness--and he was up against top talent, but you could also argue that the protection has been better when he was out of the line-up.

One of those aforesaid improbable plays: the Kayshon Boutte diving one-handed catch in the end zone. That was phenomenal. Essentially ended the game, too. Dagger. One of the best catches in the sport this year. You see one-handed catches, sure, but not one-handed diving catches, when the ground and impact is obviously a disruptive factor. It was a great throw as well, but that's what the play required: a remarkable catch. The coverage was tight.

The weekend couldn't have gone better for the Patriots. They advanced to the AFC Championship game, they don't have to deal with Josh Allen--though I'm increasingly of a mind that Josh Allen isn't all he's touted as being, or as I've often though of him, and there are fatal flaws to his game that will always be a part of it--and Denver will be counting on their back-up quarterback, a former Patriot who was with the team during one of Josh McDaniels' earlier New England stints. So there's one guy who knows him well.

Having said that, this could also work in Denver's favor. I'm not a big Bo Nix believer, and sometimes another guy jumps in and things click. Nick Foles is an obvious example. Would the Eagles have won that year with Carson Wentz in the line-up all the way through? I don't think so.

This was the only game whose outcome I got right out of the four over the weekend, and I wasn't even factoring in the spread. Just straight who wins and who loses. Two of the games went to OT. Sure, the Bears could have won and the Bills should have had they gotten a better performance from Josh Allen, but neither did. Sports betting is a losing proposition. Regardless of how much you know--or how much you think you do--because there are all these other factors that play out on the field. Bounces, breaks, luck, injuries, some guy being on that day while some other guy is off...you don't know until you know, which is after.

I'll tell you when I thought the Bears lost that game last night, though: When they drove down the field on the game's opening possession and went for it on fourth down rather than taking the points. It wasn't just that they went for it. I think it was like fourth-and-four. It was that they called a play that tried to pick up a much bigger chunk of yardage--a low percentage play that had Williams throwing off his back foot into this small and diminishing window.

I've seen the Bears do this before--they did it in their December 7 game against the Packers as well, which ended the game. If you feel like you must go for it, don't do this mini-Hail Mary thing, which is what both of those play calls struck me as. But just take the points. Those points yesterday could have been everything in that game. Maybe it doesn't go to OT and the Bears win in regulation.

Before too long, there will be only a few places in the NFL--I'm talking cold weather places now--that won't have a dome or some sort of partial covering or option for covering. All football should be played completely outdoors in whatever the weather is, unless, obviously, it's a hurricane, tornado, lightning storm, or plague of locusts or some such.

It was nice to see the snow coming down in both of those games yesterday. It just looks right, doesn't it? I was walking back from the Monument in Charlestown shortly before the Pats game kicked off, thinking it wasn't that cold--I didn't even have a beanie on, but rather a headband--but the announcers were talking about the cold in Foxborough straight away, and then soon enough it was snowing there when it wasn't here (not yet). Weather is a special part of football that obviously hockey and basketball don't have and baseball doesn't really either, unless you're talking the cold of the early spring or the autumn, but that's not the same as the rain or the snow or this kind of cold.

In sum, I'm pleased the Patriots won. For all I know about sports, they don't matter much to me. The outcomes don't matter much to me. Look what I'm up against and dealing with every day. This worse than hell situation I'm in. I can take or leave sports, while also being an expert by any measure, as my work bears out, and these pages, too. People now rarely know what's important. They don't have perspective. Their self-worth is tied up in things that others--like these athletes--do. Things that have nothing whatsoever to do with them. It's like all the Patriots fan saying, "We're back!" and bragging with constant use of the "we." You have nothing to do with any of it. No more than a bug under a log deep in the forest.

I know the Seahawks presided over a blowout the other day, but I'm still not convinced about them. Look at that box score. No one had a big game for Seattle. And yet, there are all those points...normally, that tells me something, and it tells me more about the team that got thrashed, ironically. You also have to realize that once something starts happening, it can snowball in such a way that you get this final result that maybe doesn't mean what you think it means. It's human nature to fight less when you think your chances are lower. Many times I think my chances to ever get out of this situation are lower than zero, and yet I tell myself I must fight harder than ever.

I'm not saying I do and I need to get better at actually doing that each of those times and then consistently and non-stop, but it's my mindset, something I am thinking about in terms of what...well, I was going to say needs to happen, but that implies for me to get the result. I need to be doing it anyway. And that's hard. I'm off topic now. Kind of.

The Patriots have won the games they're supposed to win. As I said, they weren't playing with house money. You never really are in life, or even in sports. People will be fooled into thinking that Stidham can't go out and help Denver win a game, whereas I'll suggest this isn't a marked drop-off. I'm hoping that yesterday's win over the Texans helps the Patriots get better by fixing aspects of their play. Helps the quarterback get better, because he needs to be better. You won't be getting a bevy of turnovers like that perhaps ever again.