To be honest, it makes me sick.

Just a few years ago, the Patriots had the greatest QB of all time and the greatest coach of all time. They lost the QB, and their first attempt to replace failed. They fired the coach, and their first attempt to replace him also failed, dramatically.

AND THEY STILL MADE IT BACK TO THE SUPER BOWL BEFORE ALL OF OUR STUIPD TEAMS.

I’m a Jets fan. We are constantly whiffing on head coach hires and doomed QB draft picks, and each one seems to reset the cycle for another 3-5 years of abject failure. And yet for these freakin’ guys, God’s very own special little football team, it didn’t matter.

I am filled with incandescent rage. I cannot believe I have to go back to the hopium mines for my franchise’s sixth attempted rebuild of the last decade while the Pats’ dark ages lasted like 18 months, tops before they found a franchise QB and an awesome head coach. It’s not fair!

– Rodger Sherman

AFC Championship Game: Patriots 10, Broncos 7

One of the rewarding things about loving football is when you get rewarded for grinding the tape — a ball-knower’s delight. That happened for me Sunday: A rep I remembered from the regular season ended up being the deciding factor in Sunday’s AFC Championship.

During Minnesota’s 26-0 loss to the Seahawks in November, there was a play where third-string quarterback Max Brosmer came under pressure and immediately forgot everything about the game of football — which direction he was supposed to go, what team he was on, how to throw a football, etc. He dropped back 19 yards and threw an underhanded pass that was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. I wrote about it in my Serious and Real Football Notes:

So it was a true ball-knower’s delight when the Broncos used the same concept Sunday. On a snap shortly before halftime, Jarrett Stidham dropped back 19 yards and threw a two-handed chest pass that went backwards and was recovered as a fumble by the Patriots defense. It was initially ruled incomplete, robbing New England of a live-ball recovery and a touchdown, but they scored two plays later — their only touchdown of the game.

I cannot stress enough that if Stidham had simply Not Done This, the Broncos likely would have beaten the Patriots. He could have simply allowed himself to be sacked for a huge loss, setting up a fourth down punt. He could have thrown the ball forward in a normal fashion, as he has presumably done tens of thousands of time in his life. That would’ve worked too.

If the Broncos had been able to punt, the Patriots likely would not have gotten a touchdown before the half. After all, they had just 206 yards on 3.2 yards per play, and had no other touchdown drives in this game. Part of that was influenced by a sudden snowstorm that dumped on Denver in the second half, rendering the rest of the game offense-free. If Denver goes into halftime up 7-0 or 7-3, they’re probably fine!

Honestly, Stidham probably could’ve just chest-passed the ball sideways at the line of scrimmage, and that would’ve been fine too. I don’t think the Pats are going 30 yards here. But he specifically dropped back 20 yards to chest-pass the ball sideways.

Last week I pointed out that the Broncos were the only team in the NFL to have zero pass attempts by their backup QB in 2025, and also the only team in the NFL to have zero pass attempts by their backup QB in 2024. This turned out to be a load-bearing factoid.

Stidham’s pressure vs. clean splits are some of the most dramatic I’ve ever seen: Stidham was 16-for-21 for 129 yards with a touchdown when kept clean, but 1-for-10 for four yards with an interception and a fumble under pressure. That is good for a 0.0 passer rating, which, as you may have guessed, is the worst you can possibly do. And of course, that 0.0 passer rating does not include the play where he ran backwards 20 yards and chest-passed the football backwards for an opposing fumble recovery, since that’s a sack and not a pass attempt.

He looked like two different quarterbacks — or, perhaps more accurately, a guy who had not taken a snap against a competitive pass rush in over two years and was completely unready for the experience. There’s nothing that can prepare a player for that in practice or in preseason. There is no simulator for the biggest, fastest, strongest men on the planet, coming to rip you apart. And Stidham totally forgot what he was supposed to do when that happened. He was bamboozled out there — the play /I keep talking about was not even his only under-pressure two-handed chest pass of the game! I think a version of Jarrett Stidham that has played a handful of snaps this season — or a version of Jarrett Stidham that plays exactly like he did Sunday, except the play where he literally ran backwards 20 yards and chest-passed the football to nobody in particular — might win this game.

This seems to keep happening to the Patriots. Thanks to some good luck and a last place finish last year, the Pats had, by a wide margin, the easiest schedule in the NFL this year. According to DVOA guru Aaron Schatz, it was the weakest schedule of the century and the third-weakest in NFL history. And DVOA doesn’t take into account which quarterbacks were playing when the Patriots faced certain teams; they got to play a lot of backups (including one in the conference championship game!)

But at a certain point, when 19 straight quarterbacks have played like garbage against this team, I might need to shut up — even if those quarterbacks were Jarrett Stidham, Quinn Ewers, Brady Cook, and .. uh … C.J. Stroud.

It’s almost February, and we are running out of what-ifs. Perhaps the Pats are going to end up getting away with it.

I consume a lot of NFL analysis, and I try to listen to smart people instead of stupid people. But I can’t remember the last thing that made all turned ball-knowers into take artists like Sam Darnold going up against the Rams in the NFC Championship game.

Like, you’d get 40 minutes into a podcast about how Mike McDonald’s defense had countered the Rams’ 13 personnel package in the regular season and they’d just be like “and this is where the Sam Darnold thing comes in.” And then they’d psychoanalyze Darnold for 4-5 minutes and go back to talking about how Nick Emmanwori or Quentin Lake or whatever.

And I’m not trying to be critical! That was exactly the correct way to analyze this game. Darnold led the NFL in turnovers this year, with six of them coming in the two games against the Rams. And last year, the Rams wrecked Darnold’s renaissance with the Vikings, sacking him 9 times in a 27-9 playoff loss that ended Minnesota’s season.

But Darnold didn’t just survive the moment. He led the Seahawks to the Super Bowl:

Darnold went 25-for-36 for 346 yards and three touchdowns. He’s only thrown for more yardage twice in 93 career starts — and he did it with no turnovers and incredible efficiency.

Sunday night was a showcase for so many Seahawks: Kenneth Walker juking guys out of their shoes; Jaxon Smith-Njigba casually making 2-to-4 catches that would be a career highlight for most other receivers; Emmanwori making plays in the run game immediately followed by pass breakups; Devon Witherspoon recovering from a bad night to make back-to-back PBUs on the biggest plays of the season; even down to Michael Dickson booming punts the Rams receivers couldn’t catch. The Seahawks are a spectacularly built team. Going back to Schatz, he has Seattle ranked as the seventh-best team in the DVOA era, and the best team since the 2007 Patriots. (The Patriots are the seventh-best team in the NFL this season, so the stats say it’s a bit of a mismatch.)

But it was all built on this one potentially shoddy fulcrum in Darnold, a player dumped by two of the sorriest franchises in the league. Even as the Seahawks won more and more and went deeper and deeper, we found ourselves asking: Really? Him? Even holding up the trophy, he doesn’t seem quite sure.

We’re in the era of the second-act QB. Teams are quicker than ever to move on from highly drafted passers, and they’re throwing out some live ones mixed in with the duds. But none has been reborn quite like Darnold, a man with multiple career-defining memes. The man who once saw ghosts is in the midst of a month-long exorcism — and now he can win the whole damn thing, if he can just beat the team that haunted him all the way back when.

Switching lanes to college football — bumping this video I made about my favorite coaching hire of the 2026 cycle. Really it’s just a way of me to talk about the obscure origin stories for 3 NFL starting quarterbacks!