The 2023 Patriots Continue to Make History. Just the Kind Nobody Wanted.
DeFodi Images. Getty Images.For the first nine or so months of 2023, really since the Patriots announced they'd hired Bill O'Brien to super glue back together the shattered pieces of a once proud offense Matt Patricia had knocked off the table in 2022, I was feeling hopeful for a bright future. And any time someone asked me what I thought and I expressed any brand of optimism, cautious or otherwise, I got some version of the same reaction. A physical manifestation of a SMH text:
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I got the pessimism. I didn't argue with it. I just accepted that few of us believed this team was fixable and that by the time Thanksgiving came and went, I'd be finding new and ever more creative ways to fire off .50-caliber Told Ya Sos in all directions like Ol' Painless in Predator:
Instead, a 2-9 with no hope of another win in sight, I'm finding new and ever more creative ways to say I Was Wrong, and resist the urge to put the barrel of the gun in my mouth.
How bad has it gotten? I swear this is a true story: Yesterday at the gym this one guy was violation the policy about no phone calls in the locker room. I wouldn't have said anything anyway. First because I'm not a scold. But mostly because I have a rule about talking to other men when one of us is naked. The phone policy is more of a guideline; my nudity shyness is a cardinal rule. Anyway, I couldn't help overhear the guy trying to get rid of tickets to Sunday's games. He was telling someone no one's getting offers on the secondary market. Tickets for $350 are on sale for 100 bucks with no takers. And even the Club seats with the food and booze included are left wanting. And it hit me that this is exactly the kinds of conversations we used to have in the pre-Bill Parcells Dark Ages. There are urban legends about people finding tickets to the old stadium under their windshield wipers. And a running joke was "We're holding a raffle. First prize is two Patriots tickets. Second prize is four Patriots tickets." It took 30 years for it come full circle, but those days are back.
But that realization wasn't rock bottom. That would come later, in the form of the Patriots making NFL history for futility:
Now to be fair, the NFL has been flexing Sunday Night Football since 2006, but dragged their feet on extending it to Monday Night Football for the obvious havoc that would ensue. A logistical nightmare of changing flights, hotel bookings, paying customers having to alter their work schedules. So this was to be used only in Weeks 12-17. And only in the most extreme cases. And the 2023 Pats are as extreme as cases get.
The Patriots are so bad, America doesn't want to be subjected to them, even if they're playing Washington Generals to the Chiefs Globetrotters. Not even if it means the pulse-pounding, high adrenaline excitement of potential Taylor Swift Watch.
We can't get ever get sick of the legendary comedy trio of Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Jake from State Farm. But watching Mahomes avoid Josh Uche and hit Kelce wide open behind Myles Bryant 10 times? BO-O-O-O-RINNNG. They'll be losing people by the millions to The Voice and Let's Make a Deal Primetime. This team is so unpopular right now, you can't get the public to take them even if you package them with the Chiefs, like when you put a pill in some hamburger so your dog will swallow it.
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And yet it gets even worse. This is how Amazon sold their Thursday Nighter in two weeks:
Can you blame them? I could sit here and make a list of the top five or 10 players on the active roster right now, and 95% of the football consuming public wouldn't know if they were actual Patriots, names I made up, or obscure Star Wars characters. Christian Barmore? Rhamondre Stevenson? Kyle Dugger? Michael Onwenu? The whole world would see that guy on the screen and go palms up/shrugged shoulders and wonder why they should tune in to see him. Arguably the guy with the most name recognition is Ezekiel Elliot, and his 377 yards and two touchdowns aren't putting eyeballs on the screen. Amazon put the head coach up there because the GM hasn't given them another option.
And so it stands. The Patriots have become the one every kid wanted to be seen with and every girl wanted to date into the one who has to eat alone in the nurse's office because no one will sit with him in the cafeteria. And the truly, truly disturbing part of it is, with six weeks still to go, there's plenty of time for it to get worse.
But hey, at least we still have them playing Denver in primetime. On Christmas Eve. FML.