Three straight Victory Mondays! Here we go!
I honestly didn’t think I’d be sitting here in October, looking at a Monday Night game between the Bills and Falcons, and thinking that there was a chance that the Patriots could be first in the AFC East through the first six weeks of the NFL season. But here we find ourselves, and the Patriots keep getting better each and every week. Yesterday’s game wasn’t perfect, but it was a solid performance overall and has the Patriots very well positioned in a conference that doesn’t have one true dominant team. Oh what a world.
- It’s currently 12:43 P.M. on Sunday, October 12th, as I type this first Fan Note. The game starts in about 15 minutes. My laptop is ready, and there’s a frosty six-pack of Tonewood Biergarten Marzen in the fridge with my name on it (shoutout to Tonewood Brewing in New Jersey, keep doing the Lord’s work). I wanted to get this one down before kickoff so I can use my third note to see how the Patriots answered the bell. There will be no editing of this note or the one that is about to follow, regardless of how the game shakes out.
- People overreacted to the Bills game, in my opinion. There was way too much “The Patriots have their guy” and “Drake Maye is a superstar” and “New England is so back” for my liking. A statement road win in primetime against a division rival widely regarded as the class of the AFC is awesome, but divisional games are always weird, and without consistency and the ability to build off that victory, that Bills win doesn’t mean anything. The Pats are about to face a very beatable Saints team as the first of four very winnable games, and how they respond in about 10 minutes is going to carry a ton more weight than how they fared against the Bills. So I’m going to go put a dent in that Tonewood now and see how well these first two Fan Notes hold up.
- And so, here I am, with the game over and all the glorious benefit of 20/20 hindsight. The Patriots won their third in a row. They didn’t blow the Saints out, and they didn’t barely squeak out a win either. So how should I play it? Should I Felger these Fan Notes, or should I Alec Shane them? “The Patriots barely beat the Saints, what a complete disaster, blow this whole thing up” or “hell yeah, let’s go!” I think we all know the answer to that question.
- And that, I think, is the best part. The Patriots just won a game, and it was kind of an unremarkable one. This kind of win, by less than one score against a bad team, would have been viewed as a catastrophic embarrassment in the Tom Brady Era. Ben Volin would have been calling for Belichick’s job and there would be article after...
Pats Pulpit
