Oops. Do we need to see 14 more of these?
The final score was Jets 24, Patriots 3. Very misleading. It might as well have been 73-0. The Patriots were thoroughly beaten by the Jets.
That’s right. The (gulp) Jets; the team that beat New England 15 times in a row before last year’s season finale. The Jets: the Sultans of Suck, the masters of the buttfumble, the team that hasn’t been to the playoffs in 13 years, the team that’s on a streak of eight losing seasons, the team that Bill Belichick hates with the force of a thousand suns.
Thursday’s contest was the first Pats-Jets game without Mr. Bill on the sidelines since 1995. The Hoodie/Golden Bachelor must be having a good laugh right now. He’s living the dream, appearing on hundreds of media platforms, owning half of Nantucket, and getting to grin while Bob and Jonathan Kraft try to find someone new to blame for their unbearable product.
Seriously. We expected 2024 to be a difficult year. We have lived so well for so long. It was clear from the start that it would be a year of reconstruction and there was no point in getting overly emotional about our footballing turnaround.
But this? Being humiliated by Aaron Rodgers and the Jets on national television in Week 3 – New England’s only prime-time appearance this season?
Compassion!
“None of it was good,” admitted rookie coach Jerod Mayo.
The 2024 Jets are nothing special. Despite a 400-139 total yard advantage, they scored just 24 points against the Patriots. They committed eight penalties for 106 yards. But no amount of self-sabotage by the Jets can make the 2024 Patriots look like an NFL threat.
Poor Jacoby Brissett. He’s a nine-year veteran with five NFL stamps (New England, Indianapolis, Miami, Cleveland, Washington). He was never a top gun and he knows he’s here to show top draftee Drake Maye how to play in the NFL. But he got hit 25 times in three games. Against the Jets, he threw for just 98 yards. Nobody deserves that piñata status.
Trailing 24-3 with 4:24 left in the game, Mayo finally took Brissett off and called Maye. The kid completed 4 of 8 passes but couldn’t score any points before time expired. He looked nervous. Who can blame him? What young quarterback would want to start his career behind New England’s terrible offensive line?
You know it’s bad when WBZ’s Dan Roche, Patriot Nation Media’s heartbroken Baghdad Bob, looks into the camera after a game and says, “I don’t see sunshine or rainbows here. It was just ugly.”
Amen.
▪ Quiz: Name four active NFL quarterbacks who started this season with more than 40,000 passing yards (answer below).
▪ The bottom line is that the Red Sox are what we thought they would be. They were above average for much of the season (Alex Cora earned his contract extension by taking the team 11 games over .500), but they slumped after the All-Star break and will miss the all-inclusive playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons.
These Bres-lowball Sox have a chance to finish a full season under .500 for the third consecutive year, something that hasn’t happened since 1959-66, part of the Pinky Higgins era. (The 1994 season was ended early by a strike.) I wonder if any Boston baseball fan bought Jordan’s furniture thinking it might be free if the Sox won the “World Championship”?
▪ “How times change” section:
Craig Breslow, de facto GM of the Red Sox, September 2024: “We were poor performance clusterers or sequencers.”
Red Sox GM Lou Gorman, March 1987: “The sun will rise, the sun will go down and I will eat lunch.”
▪ The myth of the Red Sox pitching staff was well proven over the course of the season. The Sox pitchers shone from the start – fooling batters with incredible spin rates (heard enough of the “sweeper”?) – but got worse every month from March/April through August. The bullpen collapsed in historic fashion, producing the worst post-All-Star numbers in team history.
Much of this failure is due to the owners’ insistence on finding cheap relievers, but some of it is due to the instruction the Red Sox give their pitchers. In August, the Sox’s opponents sat on the “spin cycle” stuff and constantly hit poorly placed, slow balls over the fences.
▪ Last week we learned that the Sox are laying off scouts and requiring pay cuts from scouting and office staff. Will Sam Kennedy then announce another ticket price increase?
▪ The Royals, who lost 106 games last year, spent nearly $110 million on free agents over the winter and will most likely make the playoffs. Amazing what can happen when ownership puts its foot down.
▪ The best thing about the end of the Red Sox season will (hopefully) be the end of that lame, monster-imitating crawl signal that Sox players flash in the dugout after the game. everyone Base hit. Almost every team has a stupid ritual like this, but none is more annoying than Boston’s.
▪ MLB Baserunning 101 in 2024: If you make a mistake on the bases and get thrown out for taking a big risk, as soon as the “out” call is made, send a signal to your dugout to review the play. The futile review will make everyone think you actually knew what you were doing. We won’t be fooled.
▪ Mike Yastrzemski opened the Giants’ victories in Baltimore on Tuesday and Wednesday with home runs. That must have felt good. The Orioles organization kept the young Yaz in the minors for six long years and never gave him a chance in the bigs.
▪ The WNBA playoffs begin Sunday. The league will add a 15th franchise that will return to Portland in 2026. ESPN’s WNBA ratings are up 170 percent this season, averaging 1.2 million viewers per game. Thank you, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
▪ The tackle on the play that caused a concussion and changed Tua Tagovailoa’s life was made by Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin. Two seasons ago, the NFL suspended a Monday night game when Hamlin’s heart stopped beating after a collision against the Bengals. Hamlin was revived with CPR and a defibrillator. He spent two days in an induced coma.
After the Tagovailoa attack last week, Hamlin told The Athletic, “It’s trauma. It’s always going to be there. I’m not affected by it thanks to the work I’ve done. I’ve done trauma therapy. I have a psychologist that I talk to. That’s helped me move my mind forward and move the process forward.”
▪ According to another Athletic story, Troy Aikman, 57, takes a cold shower every morning and then goes for a 20-minute walk in dim sunlight to adjust his circadian rhythm. The Super Bowl-winning quarterback turned sportscaster says he hasn’t taken a warm shower in years and goes to bed at 9 every night unless he’s working on a game.
▪ WEEI’s Rob Bradford has become a “retirement whisperer” for Red Sox players who are about to retire. Pitcher James Paxton recently told Bradford that he’s hanging them up at the end of the season. In recent years, Bradford has heard the same confessions from Rick Porcello, Mitch Moreland and Sean Casey.
▪ The White Sox look set to eclipse the 1962 Mets as the major league team with the most losses in a season since 1900. The Amazin’s went 40-120 and the ChiSox entered this weekend at 36-117 with nine games to play. The defunct Cleveland Spiders went 20-134 in 1899.
▪ Since 2015, the Yankees have a 5-0 record in postseason series against AL Central teams, but are 0-4 against the Astros.
▪ The Dodgers have not ruled out using Shohei Ohtani on the mound in the 2024 postseason.
▪ The Patriots insist Jonathan Kraft has nothing to do with their football operation. I find that unlikely, but Jonny Football is definitely gone from local media. Kraft’s last season as a weekly pre-game guest on Sports Hub was 2016. Kraft did about half of those shows in 2017 and stopped in 2018. He’s made a few appearances in recent years, but nothing since October 30, 2022.
▪ Never forget that Bobby Dalbec hit 25 home runs and scored 78 runs in 133 games in 2021 – the only good season for the Red Sox (“Chaim Bloom Magic”) since Dave Dombrowski left. Hopefully Bobby D will find a new home in the major leagues.
▪ Chris Sale has a record of 18-3 and a 2.38 ERA. Since I’m wrong so often, I’ll re-iterate this sentence from the Globe’s March 20 preseason predictions page: “Chris Sale wins the Cy Young Award and Lobel says, ‘Why can’t we get players like him?'”
▪ Skip “Go!” and collect $200 if you knew that the Boston College football team won six consecutive games against Notre Dame from 2001 to 2008.
▪ On Tuesday, hockey legend Joe Bertagna will be at the State House to announce the participants in the 2025 men’s Friendship Four as well as the teams for the inaugural women’s Friendship Four (scheduled for January 2026). The field for the 2024 men’s tournament in Belfast on Thanksgiving includes Boston University, Harvard, Notre Dame and Merrimack.
▪ “Sweetwater,” a film about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, premieres at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Boston Film Festival in MIT’s Bartos Theater in the Wiesner Building. Clifton was the first African-American to sign an NBA contract. Chuck Cooper III, the son of the first black player drafted into the NBA (Celtics, 1950), will be on hand for a panel discussion.
▪ In “Locker Room Talk – A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” Wellesley graduate and Cambridge resident Melissa Ludtke takes you back to the beginnings of female sportscasters and her groundbreaking 1978 federal court case against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
▪ RIP Dick Walsh, legendary football coach and teacher at Algonquin Regional High School, who passed away last Saturday at the age of 92.
▪ Some quality Celtics books are newly available. Chad Finn has compiled “The Boston Globe’s Story of the Boston Celtics — 1946-Present” (it might include a few Bob Ryan names). When you’re done with that, pick up a copy of Gary Washburn’s “The Boston Celtics: An Illustrated Timeline,” a hardcover, photo-filled tome on the team’s history, including the 18th banner round last spring. Washburn will be signing books Sept. 30 from 5-7 p.m. at WBUR CitySpace and Oct. 20 from 1-3 p.m. at Barnes & Noble in Hingham.
▪ Quiz answer: Aaron Rodgers (Jets), Matthew Stafford (Rams), Joe Flacco (Colts), Russell Wilson (Steelers).
Dan Shaughnessy is a columnist for the Globe. Reach him at [email protected]. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.
