Picked-up pieces while noting that the NFL’s new “dynamic” kickoff rule has basically changed nothing . . .
▪ The moribund Red Sox got shut out and managed only one hit Thursday against the Rays at the Trop.
And still . . . they gave us a better offensive show than the Patriots.
Yikes. We have to watch 14 more of these?
The final score was Jets 24, Patriots 3. Bigly misleading. It might as well have been 73-0. The Patriots were thoroughly pantsed by the Jets.
That’s right. The (gulp) Jets; the team New England beat 15 straight times before last year’s season’s 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 riding a streak of eight losing seasons, the team Bill Belichick hates with the power of a thousand suns.
Thursday’s joust was the first Pats-Jets game without Mr. Bill on the sideline since 1995. The Hoodie/Golden Bachelor must be having a good chuckle right about now. He’s living the dream, appears on a hundred media platforms, owns half of Nantucket, and gets to smirk while Bob and Jonathan Kraft try to find someone new to blame for their unwatchable product.
Seriously. We expected rough sledding in 2024. We lived so well, so long. It was always going to be a rebuilding year and there was no sense getting overly emotional about our football reversal of fortune.
But this? Getting humiliated by Aaron Rodgers and the Jets on national television — New England’s only prime-time appearance this season — in Week 3?
Mercy!
“None of it was good,” admitted rookie coach Jerod Mayo.
There’s nothing special about the 2024 Jets. They scored only 24 points against the Patriots despite a total yardage advantage of 400-139. They committed eight penalties for 106 yards. But no amount of Jet self-sabotage can make the Patriots look like a NFL threat in 2024.
Poor Jacoby Brissett. He’s a nine-year veteran with five stamps on his NFL passport (New England, Indianapolis, Miami, Cleveland, Washington). He’s never been a Top Gun and he knows he’s here to show top draftee Drake Maye how to comport yourself in the NFL. But he’s been hit 25 times in three games. He threw for only 98 yards against the Jets. No one deserves this pinata status.
Trailing, 24-3, with 4:24 left, Mayo finally sat Brissett down and summoned Maye. The kid completed 4 of 8 passes but could not put points on the board before time expired. He looked skittish. Who can blame him? What young quarterback would want to start his career behind New England’s hideous offensive line?
You know it’s bad when WBZ’s Dan Roche, the broken Baghdad Bob of Patriot Nation Media, looks into the camera after a game and says, “I don’t have any sunshine and rainbows on this one. It was just plain ugly.”
Amen.
▪ Quiz: Name four active NFL quarterbacks who came into this season with more than 40,000 passing yards (answer below).
▪ In the end, the bottom-line Red Sox are who we thought they were. They overachieved for a good portion of the season (Alex Cora earned his extension by getting this crew to 11games over .500), but they collapsed after the All-Star break and will finish out of the all-inclusive playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons.
These Bres-Lowball Sox have a chance to finish under .500 for a third straight full season, which has not happened since 1959-66, part of the Pinky Higgins era. (The 1994 season was cut short by a strike). Wonder if any Boston baseball fans loaded up on Jordan’s Furniture thinking it might be free if the Sox won the “world championship”?
▪ How Times Change Dept.:
Red Sox de facto GM Craig Breslow, September 2024: “We have been poor clusterers or sequencers of performance.”
Red Sox GM Lou Gorman, March 1987: “The sun will rise, the sun will set, and I’ll have lunch.”
▪ The myth of the Red Sox pitching staff was aptly demonstrated as the season unfolded. Sox hurlers dazzled out of the gate — tricking batters with incredible spin rates (heard enough about the “sweeper” yet?) — but got worse every month from March/April through August. The bullpen collapsed in historic fashion, submitting the worst post-All-Star numbers in team history.
Much of this failure falls on ownership’s insistence on finding cheap help, but some of it falls on what the Red Sox are instructing their pitchers to do. By August, Sox opponents were sitting on the “spin cycle” stuff, consistently launching poorly placed offspeed pitches over the fences.
▪ We learned this past week that the Sox are laying off scouts and asking members of the scouting and office staff to take pay cuts. Is this going to be followed by Sam Kennedy announcing another ticket-price increase?
▪ The Royals, who lost 106 games last year, spent nearly $110 million on free agents over the winter and most likely are going to the playoffs. Amazing what can happen when ownership goes full throttle.
▪ The best part of the end of the Red Sox season will be the end (hopefully) of that insipid, imitating-a-monster crawl signal that Sox players flash to the dugout after every base hit. Just about every team has some stupid ritual like this, none more annoying than Boston’s.
▪ MLB Baserunning 101 in 2024: When you mess up on the bases and get thrown out taking a bad risk, as soon as the “out” call is made, send a signal to your dugout to review the play. The wasted review will make everybody think you actually knew what you are doing. We are not fooled.
▪ Mike Yastrzemski led off Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s Giants wins in Baltimore with home runs. That had to feel good. The Orioles organization kept young Yaz in the minors for six long years, never giving him a shot in the bigs.
▪ The WNBA playoffs start Sunday. The league is adding a 15th franchise, returning to Portland in 2026. ESPN’s WNBA ratings this season are up 170 percent, an average of 1.2 million viewers per game. Thank you, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.
▪ The tackle on the concussion-causing play that changed the life of Tua Tagovailoa 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 brought back to life with CPR and a defibrillator. He spent two days in a medically induced coma.
After the Tagovailoa hit last week, Hamlin told The Athletic, “It’s trauma. It will always be there. I’m able to not be affected by it because of the work I’ve done. I went through trauma therapy. I have a psychologist I talk to. It’s allowed me to push my mind forward, push the process forward.”
▪ According to another Athletic story, 57-year-old Troy Aikman takes a cold shower every morning, then goes on a 20-minute walk in low-level sunlight to set his circadian rhythm. The Super Bowl-winning- quarterback-turned-broadcaster says he hasn’t taken a warm shower in years and that he goes to bed by 9 every night unless he’s working a game.
▪ WEEI’s Rob Bradford has become the “Retirement Whisperer” for Red Sox players on their last legs. Pitcher James Paxton recently revealed to Bradford that he’s hanging ‘em up at the end of the season. In past years, Bradford got the same confessions from Rick Porcello, Mitch Moreland, and Sean Casey.
▪ It looks as though the White Sox are going to topple 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 went into this weekend at 36-117 with nine to play. The defunct Cleveland Spiders went 20-134 in 1899.
▪ Since 2015, the Yankees are 5-0 in postseason series against AL Central teams, but 0-4 against the Astros.
▪ The Dodgers have not ruled out using Shohei Ohtani on the mound in the 2024 postseason.
▪ The Patriots insist that Jonathan Kraft has nothing to do with their football operation. I find this unlikely, but Jonny Football certainly has faded from local media. Kraft’s final season as a weekly Sports Hub pregame guest was 2016. Kraft did about half of those shows in 2017, then stopped in 2018. He made a couple of appearances in recent years, but nothing since Oct. 30, 2022.
▪ Never forget that Bobby Dalbec hit 25 homers and knocked in 78 runs in 133 games in 2021 — the Red Sox’ only good season (“Chaim Bloom Magic)” since Dave Dombrowski left. Hope Bobby D finds another big league home.
▪ Chris Sale is 18-3 with a 2.38 ERA. Since I’m so often wrong, let me resurrect this line from the Globe’s March 20 preseason predictions page: “Chris Sale wins Cy Young Award and Lobel says, ‘Why can’t we get players like that?’ ”
▪ Pass Go! and collect $200 if you knew that Boston College’s football team won six straight games against Notre Dame between 2001-08.
▪ On Tuesday, hockey legend Joe Bertagna will be at the State House to announce the participants in the 2025 men’s Friendship Four, plus the teams for the first Women’s Friendship Four (slated for January 2026). The field for the 2024 men’s tournament in Belfast at Thanksgiving is Boston University, Harvard, Notre Dame, and Merrimack.
▪ “Sweetwater,” a film about Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, will premiere at the Boston Film Festival Sunday at MIT’s Bartos Theater in the Wiesner Building at 7 p.m. Clifton was the first African-American to sign an NBA contract. Chuck Cooper III, the son of the NBA’s first drafted Black player (Celtics, 1950) will be on hand for a panel discussion.
▪ In “Locker Room Talk — A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside,” Wellesley grad and Cambridge resident Melissa Ludtke takes you back to the early days of women’s sports reporters and her groundbreaking 1978 federal court case against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
▪ RIP Dick Walsh, legendary Algonquin Regional High School football coach and educator, who died at 92 last Saturday.
▪ A couple of quality Celtics books are newly available. Chad Finn put together “The Boston Globe’s Story of the Boston Celtics — 1946-Present” (might be a few Bob Ryan bylines in there). When you’re done with that, get yourself a copy of Gary Washburn’s “The Boston Celtics: An Illustrated Timeline,” a hardcover, photo-filled tome on the history of the team, including last spring’s 18th banner run. Washburn will sign books at the WBUR CitySpace Sept. 30 from 5-7 and at Barnes & Noble in Hingham Oct. 20 from 1-3.
▪ Quiz answer: Aaron Rodgers (Jets), Matthew Stafford (Rams), Joe Flacco (Colts), Russell Wilson (Steelers).
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.