Last Gasps of a Dying Columnist

In true Shank style, The CHB today sets up the pins of false equivalency, then smashes them down.

Does Tom Brady suck? After all, he had a bad game last week. Ergo, Patriots fans must be throwing in the towel on his career, right?

Sure, if you are Fair Weather Shaughnessy, who assumes that everyone else either a) does or b) should treat the last game/play/breath as the most significant and telling of a person's career/life/the universe.

So naturally Shankster compares Brady's last game to the last gasps of Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas and Larry Bird (Larry Bird Watch!).

Mays, of course, was 42 in his final season, Unitas 40 (Brady just turned 37). When he was 37, Mays had an OPS of .860 and finished 13th in the MVP vote. The Unitas-backed Colts were 10-2-1 when Johnny U was 37. Larry Legend, the outlier, retired at 35, four years after major surgery to correct chronic back problems. (And he averaged 20.2 points per game in that final year, including a 49-point outburst near season end.) In his case, it was injuries, not a loss of talent, that felled him.

Also keep in mind that after the first two games last season, Brady had completed 52% of his passes (he's at 51.8% right now) and had a passer rating under 75. (At season's end, Brady had passed for 4,300 yards and had a completion percentage of 61%.) Well, you should keep it in mind, anyway, because The CHB does not.


Favorite word watch alert: Arrogant, as in, the trade of Logan Mankins was "arrogant." Right.