ABANDON SHIP! (But Seriously...)

First of all I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the New York Jets, who last week apparently not only defeated the Patriots but also won the Super Bowl, solved the healthcare issue, achieved world peace and brought Billy Mays back from the dead (too soon?).

Meanwhile the Patriots didn't just lose the game, they - at least according to the sentiment in the streets - must have committed some sort of mass genocide of those adorable lolcats. Maybe not but rumors are circulating that undertakers are measuring a casket for Tom Brady's career and the partial birth abortion that is the Patriots season was found in a dumpster somewhere in Foxboro on Tuesday.

Let's get serious here, folks. The Patriots loss did two things. First it put a 1 in the loss column during the "pivotal" week two. The Patriots are now a horrendous 1-1. A crime completely unforgivable. Second, this loss singlehandedly dumped the world's largest bandwagon ever assembled. Police are still picking up the bodies of discarded pink hats, Brady-wanna-fuckers, and Connecticutians from the wreckage. This loss is a blessing in disguise, because now (hopefully) only true Patriots fans who were around in 1996 and suffered through Pansy Pete's reign of kittens and rainbows are left. If only the Red Sox could have a loss that inspired such a cleansing.

Of all the losses this year (Rodney, Tedi, Mayo, Cassel, Vrabel, Peoli) this is easily the least painful. Keep in mind, the Jets hadn't beaten the Patriots in like 9 years. Law of averages here, people. It was bound to happen eventually. Might as well get it out in week two, right?

This week brings the Falcons and hometown hero, the man with two first names: Matt Ryan. Being as they're a NFC team this win should be easier than Lindsay Lohan after a pair of Appletinis. Then again... so should've the Bills and Jets...

I bet Trent Edwards grew up without a dad, huh?

A couple of summers ago my friend Ben made the best hamburger I’ve ever had. It had cumin in it and I’ve thought of it several times since. Last night this same Ben made me the 3 best hot dogs I’ve ever had. Then we watched football on his astonishing television; we were joined by the usual riffraff plus grilled corn and an unlikely number of classy-seeming women, and it was an exciting game, as they go.  Thing is, I still can’t tell if the Pats are any good. The defensive backs looked better than I expected . . . I think. But it’s also possible that Trent Edwards just can’t make a man look bad.  Are we certain he’s right-handed?

I also had tortilla chips and several but not too many cans of Black Label. You know what I fucking hate? Those scoop-shaped chips. Are these for people who eat ball-bearing nachos? Regular chips work fine. Stop fucking around, chip industry. Ben and Liz fed me normal-shaped chips, and Brady looked a little skittish about planting that front foot, huh? I hesitate to call a football player a pussy because I am certain I would die if I ever played a single down in the NFL, but what the fuck man, step into the throw. I don’t care that the 2-pt conversion throw was picked off, because if the play’s not there you’re fucked anyway, so no harm in just Favring it up there and hoping you get lucky. But there was no one within 10 yards of him and he still went with the fadeaway; disconcerting. 

Well, That Was Close

I'm surprised they weren't playing "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind through the Gillette speakers last night. Yikes.

I've come to the conclusion that either

A. That wasn't the Patriots or

B. That wasn't the Bills.

On paper this was a squash. A massacre. They were prepared to start the Raiders game at half-time, because even watching THE RAIDERS would be less painful than the systematic dismantling the Pats were going to give the Bills...

And yet. At half-time the Bills not only were still in the game; they were winning. I thought "That's cute. They're letting the Bills think they know how to play football." Kinda like when the Lions were visited by real professional football players. But the joke stopped being funny when the Bills were still winning in the fourth quarter. 24-13?! The Patriots offense - TOM BRADY'S OFFENSE - held to 13 points by a defense that could've applied for the government reinvestment and rebuilding package. Up was down, white was black and black was teapot. It made no sense.

Clearly, this isn't the 2007 Patriots. It's also not the 2004 Patriots. But these are the Patriots that more closely resemble the 2001 and 2003 Patriots. No flash, no pizzaz. A heart-attack every week... but a W in the right column. Of course the boys still have a lot to prove as far as this season goes, and next week offers a big opportunity with big mouth Rex Ryan and (apparently) "The Second Coming" Mark Sanchez of bitter rivals the New York Jets.

A win is a win. Even if its ugly. Which, sadly, sounds like my dating philosophy.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

I don't know about you, but me and Hank Fuckin' Williams Jr. are ready for some football!

Finally, the exercise in futility known as the "pre-season" is over, the teams that no one cares about got their games out of the way on Sunday, and now it's time for prime-time. Not Deion Sanders, but something as entertaining and electricfying as one of his suits: New England Patriots football.

The Patriots have the early game (7pm EST) on Monday Night Football against the Buffalo Bills - who could be among the worst teams in the AFC (and therefore automatically better than 75% of the NFC).

The New England Patriots have garnered comparisons over the past decade or so as the "Evil Empire" of football. Wah, wah, wah. The Patriots beat you because they're better. There's no crying in baseball (right, Pedro?) so there sure as shit ain't any crying in football. And you know what? It's good to be evil sometimes. Where would Hogan be without Rowdy Roddy Piper? Who would've watched Star Wars if it weren't for Darth Vader? What would Ernie be without his surly comrade Bert?

So you know what, if winning a fourth Lombardi trophy this decade makes us the Evil Empire then cue the Imperial March and have it blasting from the Imperial Destroyers (duck boats) as we lay waste to the Galactic Empire (NFL). I am calling this season right now "The Empire Strikes Back". Not because it was the best of the Star Wars movies (which inarguable FACT), but because with Darth Brady back at quarterback and Emperor Belichick calling the battle formations: resistance is futile.

I went for a tour of The Patriots Hall of Fame yesterday at Gillette Stadium (The Death Star. Can I stop with the analogies now?), and let me tell you: it got me fucking pumped. I found out that my vertical leap is 22 inches - not bad for a beer-laden Irish kid who hasn't done organized sports since the Clinton administration - and that's 14 inches short of Laurence Maroney. And Mauroney's our worst running back. That's right. Start quaking in fear.

So go ahead and hate the Patriots, hate New England, because all it proves is we've earned it by being better than you.

Patriots 37, Bills 10.

- V

No Need To Panic

Okay, so I'm one of the guys out front of the mob with the pitchfork and torch hunting down Haynesworth for that busch-league cheap shot on Saint Brady, but I've calmed down. Why? Chad OchoCinco.

Now I normally hate Chad with the sort of rage I tend to reserve for A-Rod and Kobe, but Chad 8-5 (not 85, but 8-5 because Chad can't count to 85 in English, let alone Spanish) twittered that he just got a call from Brady saying that Brady is okay.

Well... that sets MY mind at ease. Obviously, if its on Twitter its the gospel truth. Especially sports celebrity Twitter. As Ron Artest once mused "I wonder what I would look like if I wasn't black. Probably like Superman. BAM! POW! Gotta love white women."

Forget petty questions like, does Brady even acknowledge Chad's existence and why the fuck would Brady give Chad status updates on his shoulder... and just except the fact that Jose Canseco is the most honest man in baseball, so maybe Chad OchoCinco is the most honest man in football.

And again, its Twitter, so it has to be true.

Pre-Season Game #2 - Disposable Heroes

Will touched on a great point in his post below: what is the significance of pre-season football? Okay, he mostly talked about tacos but seriously, why should we even care about pre-season football? Its main purpose now is to make us forget about how terrible The Red Sox are playing. I mean, The Pats have their nail-biters but they don't make the football equivalent of the Blue Jays look like potential play-off teams.

Last week's game meant more than the usual pre-season game because it was the return to action of the greatest quarterback of the past decade, Tom Brady. Brady did a solid job despite his one ill-concieved, poorly-thrown interception, but other than that it was your standard pre-season football game. Which basically means most people stopped watching at half-time. I did. I came in periodically to check the score when getting more beer, but outside of Brady there wasn't much to see.

Except, of course, the new Great White Hope: Julian Edelman. Where did this guy come from? The comparisons to Wes Welker are easy because:

1. He's short

2. He's fast

3. He's a over-the-middle, agile receiver. And

4. He's white.

Being a white WR in the NFL is almost like the kiss of death, and the Patriots already have the best W-WR in the league, but did we somehow also get the second-best too? It's been obvious that the one flaw in Welker's game is that he can't return punts and kickoffs well. Edelcan, returning a punt 75-yards to pay dirt last Thursday.

Outside of finding out if Edelman is a fluke, there's not much to make a stink about with Thursday's game against the Bungles. This is only the Patriot's eighth pre-season game against an AFC team in the past 46 preseason games... but that's about the most interesting story. I'll be watching the first half to see if there's any tricky wringles The Hooded One uses with Welker and Edelman. Expect Fred Taylor to get a lot more touches this week, since Brady's proven his point.

Also, I'm going out on a limb and saying the Patriots will run a reverse today. With a speedy and talented WR core, it make sense to have a couple of tricks in the playbook.

Go Pats.

Preseason game #2

Hard tacos are the only tacos worth eating. Soft tacos are just under-filled open-faced burritos, which is not a bad thing to be but also not a thing you should order when you could instead get hard tacos or a burrito or, obviously, hard tacos AND a burrito. Last night I burned my mouth on a hard taco; at the time I considered it more a nuisance than an injury, but I still took the postcaution of immediately applying rum and sour cream, so imagine my displeasure upon waking up this morning with a blister on the roof of my motherfucking mouth. This is why I wish I had a girlfriend.

I’m ashamed to admit that I don't exactly thrive in solitude (tigers do; more on them in a few). I consider this a sign of weakness. I should be able to make decent decisions on my own, but I am what I am, and this morning that am a guy with a mouthful of blood because I just used a thumbtack to lance the aforementioned taco blister. I think if there had been a woman in the bedroom with me, she would have said, “Darling, why are you putting a thumbtack in your mouth?” and that would have been enough to jolt me back to my senses. She wouldn’t need to say, “Hey dipshit, don’t put a thumbtack in your mouth!” which is good because who needs that kinda ballbusting at 6am? I mean, my fuckin’ mouth, toots. But it would be nice to have someone around to ask the questions that need to be asked.

I’m new at sports blogging. Is this where I’m supposed to say, “Hey, I know it’s only preseason, but football’s football and football is awesome so yay!!!”? Well, I tend to get a little wordy, so let’s say we ignore that second part. Preseason football fucking blows, and everyone knows it, and everyone acknowledges it, and then everyone says, “But I’m still going to watch it, because football!!!”

You know another reason I wish I had a girlfriend? Because tomorrow night when we’re sitting around whining about how hot and tired we are, I could faux-accidentally stumble upon whatever godforsaken channel is televising the Patriots/Bengals game, pretend to perk up for a second, and then snap the TV off and announce, “You know what, sugar? Get your best dress on, because we’re going dancing,” and she would know me well enough to know that means we are going to a medium-nice restaurant to eat shellfish and drink more than we should but, credit where due, less than we could. This sort of trick would make her more tolerant of my thumbtack-eating impulses.

Regular football is great because it facilitates gambling and Sunday afternoon drinking; preseason football does neither of those things and is therefore dead to me. But I will leave you will one thought about the Patriots’ opponent.

I don’t like their name. Bengals doesn’t make any fucking sense. Bengal is an adjective here. It is a kind of tiger, but they are always referred to as “Bengal tigers” or just “tigers,” as they are the most common subspecies. (Bengal is also a state in India, but the helmets feature tiger stripes rather than corpses floating in a river, so I believe the reference is zoological rather than geographical.) Furthermore, tigers are possibly the classiest of the megafauna—neck and neck with the rhinoceros, off the top of my internally bleeding head—and the football team in question sucks. So in protest and desperation, I will henceforth refer to them as a more appropriate unconsummated animal adjective. Tomorrow night, the Patriots will play the Cincinnati Three-Toeds, and none of us right-thinkers will care.