If You're Not First, You're Last

Here's Shank on the firing of New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo:

In Jerod Mayo’s case, nice guys really do finish last

Weep not for nice guy Jerod Mayo. This wasn’t his fault.

Smart, sensible, stoic, Mayo will be a coveted commodity for many decades as an NFL assistant coach, commentator, or just about anything he pursues. He may become an NFL head coach again, perhaps a good one. He is only 38 and it’s all ahead of him.

Mayo was fired as head coach of the Patriots, less than two hours after the hapless Patriots beat the playoff-bound Buffalo Bills, 23-16, in New England’s season-finale “Stupor Bowl” at Gillette Stadium Sunday afternoon.

It was a “win” that cost the Patriots dearly, dropping them from first to fourth in the NFL’s annual April meat market. The hollow victory supplied the perfect coda for Mayo’s disastrous single season as Patriot head coach:

The 2024 Patriots: even when they win, they lose.

It’s fair to state that Mayo’s disastrous one-year reign was an ownership blunder, residue of Bob Kraft’s considerable hubris and pain from the final years of Bill Belichick’s quarter-century at the helm. Mayo should never have been handed the job in the first place and likely was promoted out of sheer loyalty to the boss. After 25 years of perceived disrespect from Belichick, Kraft wanted a head coach who was polite and beholden to the boss. The result was abysmal. Mayo was wildly inexperienced and unprepared for the lofty position.

Another Patriots column for which the real primary target is Bob Kraft.

DHL Dan CCXXXIV - On The Hot Seat?

There's a great deal of speculation about the future for first year head coach Jerod Mayo. Even with a current 3 - 13 record, Shank thinks he'll stick around because of Bob Kraft:

Bob Kraft is stubborn, so it’s doubtful that he fires Jerod Mayo after this dismal season, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while roasting chestnuts and listening to Mitch Miller carols . . .

▪ Any chance Bob Kraft fires Jerod Mayo at the end of this terrible season? Doubt it.

Kraft is stubborn and unlikely to admit he acted hastily and erred hiring Mayo one day after firing Bill Belichick in January.

We all know Mayo inherited a terrible roster. This sorry season has been torpedoed by poor drafts, second-tier assistant coaches, and the team’s failure to spend.

Every coach deserves more than a one-year tryout, right? Bill Parcells wasn’t let go when his first Patriots team started 1-11. Belichick was retained after going 5-11. Both got plenty of slack.

The Long, Cold Season Ahead

It's safe to say this year's version of the New England Patriots aren't expected to be very good, and this allows Shank to smother the Krafts like a wet blanket:

With this new era of Patriots history, we might be in for a long, cold football season

The Patriots open their season Sunday at Cincinnati and are consensus favorites to be one of the NFL’s worst teams.

It feels like we’re in for a long, cold football season. By any measure, these are the most barren days of Bob Kraft’s ownership, which dates back to 1994. After two decades of NFL dominance, the Patriots are in full decline.

They haven’t won a playoff game since 2019 and are coming off a four-win season — their worst since the 2-14 Dick MacPherson campaign of 1992 when Hugh Millen and Scott Zolak were New England’s quarterbacks.

The good news for Bob and Jonathan Kraft is that they have control of their franchise for the first time this century. For the last 24 years, the team was largely under the powerful thumb of Bill Belichick, who won 17 AFC East titles, nine conference championships, and six Super Bowls. It started to go south when Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay in the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and four days after last season’s final game — a home loss to the (gulp) Jets — Belichick was fired by Bob Kraft.

You can tell by Shank's style and enthusiasm that when he's over a target, he just opens the bomb bay doors and carpet bombs the place. I trust we'll see more of these columns in the upcoming weeks.

Whither Belichick?

As the last week of the 2023-2024 NFL regular season approaches, the speculation into Patriots coach Bill Belichick's future intensifies:

Facing the toughest decision of his stewardship, what will Patriots owner Bob Kraft do with Bill Belichick?

What now, Bob Kraft?

Kraft has owned the Patriots for 30 full and fruitful years, but has never faced a decision like this one.

Feuding with Bill Parcells and firing Pete Carroll was easy. Deciding to break promises to poor Hartford was easy. Heck, even accepting Roger Goodell’s Deflategate sanctions — after demanding an apology from the NFL — even that was easy compared to this.

What is Kraft going to do about the future of Bill Belichick, the franchise coach who has won six Super Bowls for New England? I mean, how does Kraft fire Belichick, then someday invite him back for a statue dedication?

What isn't speculation is Shank's continued disdain for Kraft:

Belichick, Kraft’s head coach for 24 seasons, is 29-38 (including playoffs) since Tom Brady left and hasn’t won a playoff game in five years. After finishing 8-9 in 2022, Kraft apologized to fans and pledged that things would get better. Things have gotten worse.

Kraft does not want to fire Belichick. New England’s needy owner longs to be loved. He wants peace with honor. He’s 82 and desperately wants to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He didn’t like the way things ended with Brady and now he’s at a critical mass regarding one of the greatest coaches of all time.

When Was That?

When Bob Kraft still liked me https://t.co/x1SA7J7mf5

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) January 18, 2019

The correct answer being - never!

Intercepted

So back on Jan. 22, when The CHB tweeted this:

do you think it ever crossed his mind that he would someday (as in today) write this:

"Tom Brady wins. Roger Goodell loses. So when does Bob Kraft reverse himself once more and go after the NFL to reclaim the $1 million fine and loss of two draft picks?"

Of course not. Which is why most of us learn by the time we reach grade school not to speak out of turn or lob grenades without knowing what the consequences of doing so might be.

But not The CHB! Reversing himself is what he does best.* Now it's the "blundering NFL" and the "stubborn" NFL commissioner Roger Goodell who are in the wrong.

Perhaps changing your mind is "just part of the editorial process."


*The bartenders at The Four's might disagree.

'Madness in the Spring'

Yesterday it was, could Bob Kraft be assembling a commissioner coup? Today it's "Bob wimped out."

To recap:

• The CHB believes the Patriots cheated and then lied about it.
• The CHB believes the Patriots had its punishment coming if for no other reason they have been guilty of the crime of "arrogance" (which in CHB talk is the same as "winning").
• The CHB believes writing the same column seven or eight times in a row will somehow change people's minds, or not, because we, too, are "arrogant."

Given that the NFL rules don't allow appeals from ownership, the smart thing for Kraft was to concede, so naturally The CHB sees this as a sign of weakness, even though he thinks they are as guilty as OJ.

What I found comical is that Shank has spent multiple columns on the Deflategate story over multiple days in San Francisco and has yet to land an interview with a Patriots player or employee.

There's also this odd Jethro Tull reference thrown in ("Patriot fans spitting out pieces of their broken luck," which is funny in that if anyone has less need for an aqualung, it's The CHB, who is already full of air (and probably has spent more than one afternoon in a boozy haze sitting on a park bench with snot running down his nose).

Brady, Patriots Make The CHB Wet

Now that an NFL investigation is complete, the Patriots in general and Tom Brady in particular are going to pay a tremendous price for their role in deflating footballs during the playoffs last season.

The Patriots are sanctimonious, arrogant, and "obstructionists."

Tom Brady is a lying cheater.

Bob Kraft is an insane whiner.

That's The CHB's column today in a nutshell.

So Tom Brady is now a wicked person, in the vein of other evildoers like Manny Ramirez, Nomar Garciaparra and Theo Epstein. Obviously whatever the worst offense you ever committed in your life is who you are. (What does that say about (Son of) Sam Shaughnessy, who got drunk and was busted for assaulting a cop?)

We needn't loo far in the Shank canon for instruction. Here's what The CHB wrote on Bill Parcell's induction to the Hall of Fame in August 2013:

He is renowned as the great, almighty Tuna, the quintessential Jersey guy who engaged reporters and insisted, “You are what your record says you are.’’ ... Parcells is the man who rescued the Patriots from irrelevance and maybe from a move to St. Louis. More than Bob Kraft, Tom Brady or Bill Belichick, Parcells is the man who changed the culture of football in Foxborough.

If Parcells is a local hero, and responsible for the Patriots culture, then isn't Parcells to blame? And if you are what your record says you are, well, doesn't that mean Patriots are Super Bowl champions?

Ever since their second Super Bowl loss to the Giants, The CHB has been writing some variation of the theme that the Patriots are done. This past year scuttled that pseudo franchise-in-the-making. Shank may be saying a hard rain's gonna fall (wicked bad cliche alert!), but it says The CHB is, once again, all wet.

Thoughts on Everything ... But the Game Itself

The penultimate Super Bowl column is one The CHB could have written in his sleep -- and probably did.

A recap of the events of the past two weeks, including the requisite nod toward ex Pats coach Pete Carroll (and -- who else? -- Bob Kraft), Spygate, David Tyree, Deflategate, and whether the Patriots are cheaters. Oh, and the "L" word: Legacy, as if winning three Super Bowls would somehow be diminished if they fail to capture a fourth. (Keep in mind that Tom Brady is the only Patriot remaining who was on that first Lombardi Trophy winner.)

How much of this has anything to do with tonight's game? Zero, zip, nil. But that's also what The CHB knows about football, and he has to fill his column with something, so as long as the Globe pays him for shit, where's the incentive to produce anything else?

No Rhythm in His 'Carroll-ing'

Just three years ago, Pete Carroll was a Shaughnessy punchline:

"Now 70 years old, [Bob] Kraft has been the face of the Patriots since Jan. 21, 1994 when he bought the franchise from James Orthwein. He went through some growing pains in the early years - announcing he was moving the team to Hartford, publicly feuding with coach Bill Parcells, and sometimes getting a little too involved with football operations. His first coaching hire was Pete Carroll.

But Kraft proved to be a quick study ...."

Fast forward to today, and now it's "Carroll was the victim of the Patriot owner’s learning curve."

Sorry to say, we remember the past. Here's what The CHB said of Carroll in 1999, while he was still the Pats coach: "Leaderless, clueless, simmering on the edge of mutiny, the Patriots lurch toward December facing a series of winnable games. "But it's hard to make a case for them. It feels like the window is closing in on the young, talented group that made it to the Super Bowl just before Carroll's arrival."

Huh.

Here's what's funny. Carroll shot Shaughnessy down in 2007, pointing out what an utter reject of a sportswriter he is: "It’s too bad you didn’t get it. You didn’t figure out what I could have brought you. You guys never knew. You never asked me any questions. You guys never figured out who I was. You never even asked. We talked about hamstrings and shoulders and stuff. You guys never did figure it out. It was terrible and it didn’t have to be like that. But all of that having been said, we were just a couple of football decisions from being on the other side of it.”

Classic.

Wonder if Shank still thinks the Patriots are going to win the Super Bowl?

In any case, let's just wait for the column Monday, where he calls the Carroll firing Bob Kraft's worst decision.

Slightly Rewriting History

Shank continues his torrid pace, writing another Super Bowl column, this time focusing on Pete Carroll. You might remember Carroll as a former coach of the New England Patriots. You might also remember Shank's praise of Carroll from that era:

NEW YORK — Boola boola. Yahoo. Pumped and jacked. Pete the Poodle Carroll is in the Super Bowl.

I absolutely love this. Everybody loves this. We all love Pete and we will never forget his place in New England sports history.

Except that this lovefest wasn't always the case:

It took less than four years, but the hubris and blundering of Messrs. Kraft, Carroll, and Bobby Grier have created a team that can lose to the new Cleveland Browns by a hideous count of 19-11. …

Slightly less hideous:

As they stumble through a nightmarish middle season (four losses in five games, five in seven games) and we face the ugly, heretofore unthinkable prospect that the defending AFC champs might not even make the playoffs, coach Pete Carroll and quarterback Drew Bledsoe have emerged as favorite whipping boys for Patriot Nation.

For the past seventeen years, Shank has absolutely hated Patriot owner Bob Kraft, which I've never really understood, and Shank just wants to take a few more cheap shots:

Pete Carroll forever will be the Other Guy who coached the Patriots. He was the bridge (1997-99) from Bill Parcells to Bill Belichick. He was the one with the whistle around his neck when silly Bob Kraft (in the pre-Hugh Hefner days) was walking around with a stopwatch, talking about drafting “press corners’’ and interfering with his head coach.

It was the age of Amos Alonzo Kraft, and Carroll was the victim of the Patriot owner’s learning curve. The Patriots let Curtis Martin go to the Jets. Kraft turned player personnel over to Bobby Grier. The Krafts stuck their noses into the football operation and poor Pete was powerless to make things right.