Pigskin Armageddon

Could this Sunday's game be the biggest, singularly important, most consequential, Western Civilization hangs in the balance with all life as we know it ending game of the post-Brady era Patriots?

You know, until the week after that, of course.

Yes, we football fans have a disturbing habit of making our pigskin heroes next game something just short of existential.

Wait.

Did I say "just short of existential?"

Who am I kidding?

Still, if I'm following what the pigskin pundits and bobbleheads are saying, this week's game, if not existential, is most certainly an inflection point in New England Patriots history.

Like the Mo Lewis almost kills Drew Bledsoe inflection point.

The gridiron cognoscenti have already decided the Belichick-Brady Era was really just the Brady Era; Bill Belichick is, at best, an artifact of the bygone age of leather helmets and fullbacks that actually ran with the football. If the Patriots miss the playoffs (a near statistical lock at the moment), Robert Kraft will tear the team down to the studs, firing Belichick and hiring a new head coach and GM.

Who will then draft a new Quarterback of the Future.

Not that a job in the NFL isn't game-to-game (if not play-to-play) for every man who straps on a helmet, but Mac Jones is, per the wisdom of the pigskin crowd, playing this Sunday for his pigskin life.

Pigskin life, it seems, comes at you fast. And stands 6' 3" tall, weighs 265 pounds, and runs the 40 in under 4.8 seconds. 

This Sunday will be the start of something. 

Maybe it will mark the end of the greatest run in the history of the NFL 

Maybe it will be the start of a statistically unlikely run to the playoffs for the Patriots. Stats are for losers, after all. 

Or maybe, none of that is true. 

Maybe it won't mean much of anything; certainly not if it's like that Jets game.

In truth, I don't know if anything can change the narrative for Belichick, Jones, and the Patriots. McCorkle could post a 30/40/400/4/0 slash line this Sunday and I don't think it would make the mob put down their torches and pitchforks. Right or wrong, Mac Jones has become the personification of Patriots Nations' post-Brady despair, despond and depression. Nothing short of a Super Bowl will keep Jones in a Patriots uniform beyond 2023, and if you thought 2001 was crazy, New England making it to Super Bowl LVIII in Vegas would be a Christopher Nolan movie, edited with a Cuisinart blender.

I don't think any of us are going to believe Tom Hardy as Mac Jones.

Again, what am I saying? Tom Hardy is that good.

Yeah.

In my mind, I'm seeing Mac Jones, standing defiantly on the beach at Dunkirk, with a grin that says, Eat shit, Nazi assholes! 

Yeah!

Sorry. Got a little carried away there. As one does…

Let's fucking go!