Happy least productive week of the year, everyone!
Thanks for spending some of the time you’re killing at the office today and tomorrow with me as I break down the 10th Patriots win of the year. I’ve always found that braving the holiday traffic and Black Friday deals is a lot easier when it comes on the heels of a Patriots win, so I’m glad to be kicking off the holiday season the right way.
- If nothing else, this game hammered home just how much of a massive win the 2025 season is for the New England Patriots. This was a team we were all hoping would show some promise this year, maybe string together a few wins, go 9-8 – or if a ton goes right, 10-7 – and sneak into the playoffs as a Wild Card team. And maybe they’d get hot and upset the Texans or Ravens in the postseason before getting beaten down in the Divisional Round. August Alec would have been over the moon with the above scenario. So that November Alec, coming into a game that he had pegged as a definite L the moment the schedule came out, is upset over this one because they didn’t look all that great and there are clearly some glaring holes that could come back to bite them in the postseason, is simply incredible. We’re basically playing with house money at this point, and we’d all do well to remember that.
- That said, I didn’t have one minute of fun from the opening whistle of that sloppy, slow, paceless, injury-infested game to the very last play. And in a weird way, I missed that feeling too.
- The only thing that really matters today, and in the days to come, is the injury status of some key pieces along the offensive line. I don’t know how often very large men leave a football field on the back of a cart with a towel over their heads and return to action the same season, but I know it isn’t nearly as often as any of us would like it to be. The Patriots lost two-fifths of the offensive line yesterday, a line that was finally starting to come together and gel. And it would have been three-fifths, but luckily Morgan Moses’s illness was a temporary thing.
- To that end, when a lineman takes a knee, walks briskly back to the locker room, spends some time in there, then comes back with everything back to normal, I think it’s safe to assume what went down. Dante was of the opinion that there are nine circles of hell. But he’s wrong. There’s a lesser-known tenth circle, spoken about only in terrified whispers, and reserved solely for those whose lives were so wicked that they have been sent back to earth, reincarnated as toilets, to be used by any number of 300 lb plus linemen who need to deal with that particular “illness.”
- And it’s really the...
Pats Pulpit
