Smoke And Mirrors

Never one to let a bad New England Patriots loss go to waste, Shank laments the end of a situation he cheerleaded for three weeks, complete with lame nostalgia, a Jethro Tull lyric mention (feel free to guess which one!) and baseball cross-references:

After Patriots’ defeat, it is easy to see the magic show was just smoke and mirrors

For a couple of minutes in the second quarter, it was Zappe Magic and almost felt like 21 years ago when young Tom Brady came out of nowhere and took the quarterback job from Drew Bledsoe.

In the first half of the prime-time “Monday Night Football” game against the Bears, Mac Jones was Wally Pipped by Bailey Zappe’s Lou Gehrig (Zappe even wears No. 4). Zappe was Elvis. He was Rudy — with talent. The fourth-round pick from Western Kentucky came off the bench and directed two TD drives in less than four minutes, rocking Gillette to its foundation, and taking the Patriots from a 10-0 deficit to a 14-10 lead. The golly-gee kid completed 4 of 4 passes for 97 yards. He threw a 30-yard touchdown pass to Jakobi Meyers and a 43-yard bomb to DeVante Parker.

Despite preposterous insistence that the Pats were planning to play two quarterbacks regardless of performance (lie detector machines exploding from Portland to Newport), our local quarterback controversy was in full (not Chaim) Bloom when Jones failed and Zappe succeeded in the first half. In that moment, Zappe officially supplanted last year’s Pro Bowl/playoff rookie, Jones, who came to New England as a first-round QB savior. It looked like the Pats would move to 4-3 and take Zappe Magic into the Meadowlands against the hated Jets this weekend.