What ex-Pats coaches and publishing people have in common, w/cameos from Mark "Am I Drunk or Just Drunk with Rage" Warren and David "Sexual Harassment is Cool if You're the Right Kind of Guy" Remnick

Sunday 10/5/25

That was some drubbing the Boston College Eagles took yesterday on the road courtesy of the Pittsburgh Panthers. The score was 31-0 at the half, before finishing at 48-7.

This is the worst Boston College football team of my lifetime. Look at Bill O'Brien. It's almost like those Patriots coaches weren't worth a damn--or close to what people once thought--and Tom Brady and his legacy looks better and better with each embarrassing shellacking.

I don't expect BC to win another game this year and for them to finish 1-11, their only victory having come in Week 1 versus Fordham, and I'm sorry, but you can't even really count that save that it technically counts. That isn't that different than putting Acton-Boxborough on the schedule as a kind of official scrimmage.

My feeling is that O'Brien took this job for some Boston-based reason. His wife wanted to be here, his family did. Maybe there was a health issue and having access to Boston's hospitals was important. I don't know. But it was an odd move to me. Not because I think O'Brien isn't a meathead-dolt, but on account that morons put so much stock in resumes, without ever stopping to think that maybe none of that stuff, on the surface, means jack shit.

Like in publishing. Laura van den Berg and all of the people like her get their awards and their stories placed without that other person and people so much as reading their work. It's all based on being a certain kind of person, connections, money, etc. There isn't some wise council of elders that foregathers in a cave and reads the work seriously, evaluating it on its merits, honestly assessing the abilities of the work's creator.

Do you really think something like that happens when a book is hyped on some Oprah "Best Books of the Year" list? You have to be pretty fucking stupid--or just not thinking at all--to believe that that's how that works. But just about everyone acts like that's exactly how it does, right?

Bill O'Brien turned around Penn State, he took a team to the playoffs in the NFL, he was the Patriots offensive coordinator and worked with Tom Brady, and now he's going to go 1-11, or maybe 2-10, or 3-9 if the team gets hot--that's funny--with Boston College and their dead easy schedule. Look at that ACC. Cal? Stanford? BC may be the worst football team in all of the power conferences.

The reputations and legacies of these ex-Patriots coaches sink further down into the muck with each passing Saturday, including those of the man once heralded as the greatest coach of all-time in Bill Belichick, whose UNC team was predictably stomped yesterday by a mediocre Clemson squad representing a program that is itself a far cry of what it used to be.

Here's something someone else posted yesterday--it was on Reddit, so I can't really do attribution--that provides a breakdown of Belichick's staff at UNC. This is how publishing works, too. This kind of bullshit, except that while it's not rare to see this in football, it's virtually all you see in publishing.

• GM Mike Lombardi - former podcast co-host, last a GM for 2013 Browns (5-11)

• OC Freddie Kitchens - last called plays as interim 0C for 2021 NY Giants (1-6)

• QB Coach Matt Lombardi - GM's son

• WR Garrick McGee - 6th school in 9 years as a pos coach

• RB Natcone Means - 1st year as FBS position coach

• DC Steve Belichick - Coach's son

• DB Brian Belichick - Coach's son

• CB Armond Hawkins - 1st year as a position coach

• ILB Jamie Collins - 1st coaching job

• OLB Ty Nichols - 1st year as a position coach

• ST Mike Priefer - No college work since 2001

Yikes, right? Fucking gross.

Publishing is worse, but it's the same idea. Unlike publishing, sports is a meritocracy--so you get kicked to the curb (fired if you're a coach) rather than hyped along and handed your latest award simply because you suck as much and in the same ways as the bestowers, the hypers, the deciders, the green lighters, the deal givers, the quid pro quoers, the on-the-takers, the reach arounders, the fakers of that essentially hermetically-sealed sub-culture of a world that has nothing to do with ability, save that the more of it that someone possesses and displays, the more people in that world envy, fear, are terrified of standing in publicly presented contrast with, and wish and feel like they need to suppress and lock out that person, never mind grant them something so basic and minimal as an honest, neutral chance, while they are rigging the system for themselves and people as bad as themselves in what are the same ultimately comforting ways to such a blighted, soulless husk of a non-individual and non-talent.

Publishing is so incestuous figuratively speaking that if that figurative incest was made tangibly physical, these people like a Laura van den Berg, a Bradford Morrow, a George Saunders, a Wendy "the bag of hag" Lesser, a J. Robert Lennon, a Sigrid Rausing, a John Freeman, a David "Sexual Harassment is Cool if You're the Right Kind of Guy" Remnick, a Mark "Am I Drunk or Just Drunk with Rage" Warren, a Patrick Ryan, a David "The Disabled Don't Deserve to Work" Sedaris, a Joel "Holy Shit am I Slimy But Still Probably Super Sexy to the Ladies (You Know You Love It)" Whitney, an Emily "Class as in Classism is Now in Session" Stokes, a Halimah "If You Want to Be My Intern You Damn Well Better Publish My Shitty Story at that Student Run Lit Mag of Yours" Marcus, a Joshua "Do You Believe They Gave Me a Pulitzer for this Garbage" Cohen, a Christian "I Can Help Your Career" Lorentzen, would be walking around with skulls shaped like footballs with the air let out and mouths on the sides of their faces and like one clump of scraggly hair just above an eyebrow and translucent skin and an eye two inches higher than the other. Same (anti) principle as with what Belichick has done. He was doing it for quite a while in New England, too.