If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this one represents a lot of swearing and elongated “A” sounds. And so, the collective population of Massachusetts and surrounding environs will wake up tomorrow morning and call Kansas City Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard “a bahhhstahhhhd,” as his hit to Tom Brady has probably ended the quarterback’s season with a torn ACL, Yahoo!’s Michael Silver is reporting.
First off, the obvious statement: New England is fucked. I’m not convinced that Laurence Maroney and Sammy Morris are good enough runners to carry an offence that is dealing with a quarterback as inexperienced as Matt Cassel. It seems like everyone thinks he might be good, but there’s no proof of that other than the idea that the better part of a decade spent holding Tom Brady’s clipboard can make someone into a good quarterback. Maybe that’s true, but I’m not willing to bet on it. And he’s certainly not throwing 40–50 tourchdowns this year.
Anyways, I like Morris and Maroney, and believe they make an excellent running tandem, but their limited successes have always come with Brady putting up big numbers through the air, and I don’t believe that they will be able to be feature backs in an offence that doesn’t put up record numbers through the air—at least not yet. Further confounding this issue is that New England’s offensive line was absolutely putrid in the Super Bowl against the Giants and looked no better in the preseason. They were solid against KC, but that’s also a terrible team, and solid isn’t outstanding.
Secondly, what a shitty pair of games the Patriots have had: first they lose the Super Bowl on the flukiest catch on the lamest duck throw since the invention of the forward pass, then they lose their all-everything QB, the most popular player in team history, for the season in the first game of the year. Of course, with the way the Celtics, Red Sox and Patriots have played in the past 7 years, the city of Boston was kind of due for something to go wrong. Of course, there couldn’t have been a worse something to have happen. As I said, Brady is easily the most beloved Patriot of all time (why else would Bostonians not only put up with but also outwardly enjoy his metrosexual, media-whoring ways?), but he’s also the most popular Boston athlete period since probably Larry Bird (though I’m willing to hear arguments in favour of both Pedro and Cam Neely).
Finally, perhaps the only good thing to come about from Brady’s injury is that I won’t spend another football season gushing about how great his hair is. Seriously, I don’t know how a guy can spend three hours sweating in the mud with 21 300-pound dudes and still come out the other end smelling like lollipops and looking better than he did when he went in.
