The first half of the Patriots season has been crazier than any other
We've come a long way in eight games.
COMMENTARY
On Thursday morning, the Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians in extra innings to win Game 7 of the World Series. Next Tuesday, Donald Trump might be elected President of the United States. In most years these two facts might qualify as surprising, but here in 2016 it’s just life. Keeping with that theme, amidst all the craziness, this column contends that the recently completed first half of the New England Patriots season was the craziest first eight weeks of the Brady/Belichick era.
Of course crazy can mean a lot of things, but in this case it means everything. It’s an all-encompassing stew of words like wild and polarizing and unpredictable and scandalous. It’s impressively demented like Baxter eating an entire wheel of cheese, and here’s why – of all the crazy starts to all the crazy seasons, 2016 takes the cake.
*Belichick grunt*
First of all because everything is crazier in 2016. The world impacts us more than ever before. This is an aggressive thought for a Friday morning, but can you imagine what 9/11 would have been like with today’s technology? The videos, the tweets, the Periscopes. For better and worse, there’d just be more of everything. More heartbreak. More happy endings. More horror. More modern miracles. And in this case it would’ve heightened the backdrop behind the relatively insignificant events of September 23, 2001. You know, Mo Lewis hits Drew Bledsoe. Tom Brady steps into the huddle. Think about social media on the day Bledsoe turned up at the emergency room with blood in his lungs. There’s a 50 percent chance someone would have incorrectly reported him dead. Or what about the scene on Twitter when Brady started winning, controversy started brewing, and New England stood on the verge of Civil War?
Or what about the first eight weeks of the 2003 season – when they cut Lawyer Milloy, got their butts kicked in Buffalo and absolutely without a doubt hated their coach. There was the bad loss to Patrick Ramsey in Washington and the overtime bomb to Troy Brown in Miami. This was crazy in every sense of the word – and it all happened four years before the first iPhone. What did we do with ourselves? Talk to people? Listen to the radio? I remember it was all a big deal, but don’t remember how. Either way it’s almost impossible to compare today and 2003. Same goes for 2007, in the wake of Spygate. Same goes for 2010, when Belichick traded Randy Moss and summoned Deion Branch from the dead.
From a technology standpoint, 2014 is the only especially insane first half that can hang with 2016. That season started with Belichick trading Logan Mankins, aka low hanging fruit in case of a disaster. Then the Pats opened with an ugly loss in Miami. A few weeks later, there was rock bottom in Kansas City, questions about Brady’s job security, and the birth of “On To Cincinnati.” That season also featured a wild Thursday night road win against the Jets. This was the night Brady got upset because the balls were overinflated and the ensuing text conversations were used to frame him in Deflategate. We didn’t know that in real time but it probably doesn’t matter.
As crazy as all that was, it doesn’t compare to 2016. Nothing does. Or I don’t know, maybe I’m just a prisoner of the moment, but looking back on the last two months feels like looking back on multiple Patriot lifetimes. Like with the Trump campaign, there’s so much craziness that crazy isn’t even crazy anymore. It’s just normal.
It began with Brady sitting out four games for the most absurd player suspension in American professional sports history. Over that first month, instead of playing football, the greatest quarterback of all time published a weekly newsletter on Facebook and was photographed sunbathing naked on a balcony in Italy. On the field the Pats started in Arizona, bigger underdogs than at any point since the Super Bowl against the Rams, and embarrassed the Cardinals (and the commissioner) on national TV. Before we knew it, Jimmy Garoppolo was the second coming. Before we knew it, Jimmy Garoppolo was on the turf with his shoulder in pieces. Before we knew it, Jacoby Brissett ran off tackle for a 27-yard-touchdown and sprained his thumb before the musket smoke cleared the sky.
Now who’s the quarterback – Julian Edelman? Gronk still isn’t right. Wes Welker’s hanging out in the parking lot with the most terrifying Tom Brady mask you’ve ever seen. The best kicker in football forgets how to kick. Bill Belichick becomes a grandfather. Bill Belichick becomes the fourth coach in NFL history with 250 wins. Bill Belichick takes on Microsoft. Meanwhile Foxborough was supposed to suck the life out of Martellus Bennett but he’s better than ever between the lines while keeping his edge in the locker room. He compares himself to a private jet. He calls his ex-teammates bitches. He tells reporters he plans to science the f*** out of the Patriots game plan.
Of course Brady eventually returned and things got back to normal. You know, tons of TDs, no interceptions, fans in Buffalo throwing dildos at opposing players. Gronk is back, breaking franchise records, sitting one nice touchdown from 69. And oh yeah, Bill traded Jamie Collins for a third or fourth round pick.
Reading through it again, so much has changed over eight games – but a few things have remained. For instance, back in September, the Patriots opened the season as Super Bowl favorites. When Brady came back a month later, the Patriots were Super Bowl favorites. Today, halfway through the schedule, the Patriots are 2 to 1 Super Bowl favorites. The closest competition is 10 to 1. Naturally odds are only odds but in this case they leave no question about the expectations in Foxborough. For every complaint or concern, for all the craziness of the first eight weeks, there’s nothing crazy about the opinion that the Patriots at their best are the best team in football.
But we’ve been here before.
New England’s riding this wave for more than 15 years now, since before iPhones and Facebook and anything resembling our current way of life. Over that time we’ve learned a few things about what it takes to win a Super Bowl. Things like health, and home field advantage, and knowledge that while the first half of a season can make for crazy stories, it’s the second half that makes history.
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