Perhaps not so fast, Patriots fans (prefer though I do that they're correct)

Saturday 1/24/26

The locals are talking as though it's a forgone conclusion that the Patriots will beat Denver in Denver now that the Broncos must play their back-up quarterback, but this isn't my view. All single-elimination games are eminently losable for each side involved.

Patriots fans don't seem to realize that their team very well could have lost if their opponent last week had gotten some historically bad quarterback play. That is, if the quarterback was merely bad, rather than the author of one of the worst games you'll see at the position.

Drake Maye is a fumbling machine. Four fumbles last week? He puts the ball on the ground. Just like he makes two or three amazing throws game, this is something he does. Until he stops doing it, I'm not going to presume he won't. If throws an interception and fumbles twice and the Pats don't recover those fumbles, the Patriots are likely to lose. Is such a thing not possible? Of course it is. It's not far-fetched.

The Patriots have been living dangerously. When you live dangerously, it tends to catch up with you. Or else time just runs out and you get away with it, in a sense, if you failed to correct it. This is the kind of thing that rarely is fixed from one week to another. It takes more time than that. Nor is it an in-season fix. You improve on it over a couple years, and then eventually it isn't a problem anymore.

Will Campbell is also a turnstile, which doesn't help. Denver has some ugly wins this year against bad teams, and Bo Nix helped them get some of those wins, but he wasn't their main reason for the record they had like Drake Maye was for the Patriots. And, again, this is something that New England fans appear to be wholly unaware of.

As for Jarrett Stidham: I don't think he's a very committed player. Didn't have this burning desire, or much of a desire at all, to be the guy. I think he likes his job as a back-up. The money, the life, without the pressure, the risk, the responsibility.

But hey: It's one week. Against the team who moved on from him. Granted, Stidham couldn't beat out Cam Newton, who may have been the worst quarterback I've ever seen during his one season with the Patriots and was never very good, even when he won an MVP.

He was just a big guy who leaned forward while moving his legs, and people are dumb and think he was exceptional. He never could throw, and the running was a size thing. But then he got worse. It felt like an event when Newton didn't throw a two-hopper to a receiver. And when he went down, the Pats went with Hoyer--and man was he terrible and another guy who always wanted to be a back-up/coaster--instead of Stidham.

Now, some of that is because Belichick likely hated him and did his grudge thing, but still, that's not all it was.

Let's look at this way, though: What are the chances that Stidham is as bad as Stroud was last week? Nil, right? What are the chances that he's significantly better? High, yes?

What I'm saying is, if the Patriots play like they did last week--on offense--they'll lose this game. It won't look surprising later on. Maye isn't some locked-down player yet. He plays loose.

Or let's say Maye gets hurt. He puts himself in a situation or two every game where someone is on the cusp of delivering a blow that results in Maye staying down on the field and the trainer running out. Who do you like if he goes down on the Pats' second possession of the game? At best for the Patriots, it's a pick 'em at that point.

I expect the Patriots to win this game and not win the Super Bowl, and obviously hope I'm wrong about the latter. Win when you get there, because you're unlikely to be back anytime soon. It's just how it works, unless you're one of the best teams of the last ten or twelve years. Is that these Patriots? It'd be nuts to suggest that right now.

Things can change fast in sports, never to be the same. What a player can do one year, he's incapable of the next. Or next month. Things don't carry over nearly as much as almost all sports fans assume.

Denver's a hard place to play. It's loud, and then you have the altitude. It's as if one team is in better shape than the other, because they're acclimated to that altitude. The average American has no clue how fitness works/is because the average American is sitting on their capacious ass on the couch snacking and drinking away, and if we don't experience something firsthand, we tend to be oblivious to its workings/realities, but this is a significant deficit to have to overcome.

Quarterbacks who don't play much usually struggle with pressure. Stidham has never been good in his limited playing time versus pressure. So it follows that the Patriots will try to bring the pressure, and better yet if they can do it without blitzing.

What happens to rushing linemen as games wear on? They get gassed. Worn down. Let's say it's close late. That altitude factor can become huge. Those big bodies are even more gassed. The quarterback has that much more time. The receivers get that much longer to shed their coverage. A couple turnovers here, a big third down conversion there, and a game that might have gone one way in the end goes the other.

You know what's strange, though? Despite so many examples--and examples in recent memory--of an expected result failing to happen, people talk like the outcome of a given game is fait accompli--as though the game has already been played and is in the books.

There must be a lot people out there losing large sums of money to sports gambling. I feel like that's an under-reported, very common addiction/albatross in American lives right now, especially male lives. And also probably porn addiction. Personal finances and personal sex lives, as such, are likelier to be kept hidden by a person, and preferred to be kept hidden, than, say, their alcohol issue. There isn't a perceived stigma--or not as much of one--to saying you have a drinking problem and going to AA and that kind of thing.

As I always say, you don't know until you know. You may have your reasons for thinking how matters will go, and they can be sound reasons, but one reason that windows exist is for reasons to go flying out of them.

Incidentally: Boston's Town Crier told me on Thursday that there was no way the Patriots would lose and that they'd prevail by a score of 34-16. The Town Crier has been at it for forty years. He sits in the Common in the morning and as you go by, he tells you the high and low temperature for the day, the expected weather, the result from the night before for the local sports teams. Any current true Bostonian would know precisely the fellow I'm talking about.