Comparison Made

Leading up to the Super Bowl gives us many columns about one or both teams that'll be playing next Sunday night. Shank sets his sights on the Kansas City Chiefs and makes a comparison of them with... the New England Patriots!

These Chiefs will never be the Patriots, but it’s time for New England to embrace their modern-day dominance

Don’t fight it any longer, New England.

It’s time to adopt the Kansas City Chiefs.

They are you as you are they and you are me and we are all together. Kansas City’s coach, Andy Reid, is “The Walrus.”

There’s a lot of regional and national negativity directed at the Chiefs. Fans outside of Kansas City largely hate them. They win too much. They are always programmed in coveted prime-time slots. They get all the calls from the officials. They have an ever-clutch quarterback who’s constantly on TV selling us something. They are invariably lucky.

Sound like any team you loved from 2001-19?

Face it, Pats fans. Aside from the cheating and the paranoia, today’s Kansas City Chiefs are your New England Patriots in the first 18 years of this century.

Unfortunate

That's Shank's opinion on the late hit in last night's game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Kansas City Chiefs which wound up helping the Chiefs to win, 23-20:

The Bengals’ unfortunate Joseph Ossai pushed himself into a dubious spotlight

And who better to help put Joseph Ossai into a dubious spotlight than Our Man Shank?

Some people see GOATS and think of Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Bobby Orr.

I see Goats and think of Bill Buckner, Scott Norwood, Grady Little, Pete Carroll, and now Joseph Ossai.

Let's not forget Shank's attempt at revisionist history when Bill Buckner passed away a few years ago; Shank's praise or denigration of certain Boston athletes depends on the situation.

Super Bowl LVII will feature Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs against the indomitable Philadelphia Eagles, who have shredded everything in their path on the way to Glendale, Ariz.

The Eagles got there with great help from the football gods, who determined that every man playing quarterback for San Francisco would get hurt this year. The Chiefs, meanwhile, were gifted when a humble, 22-year-old kid from Nigeria was flagged for a personal foul when he pushed an already-out-of-bounds Mahomes to the ground in a 20-20 game with eight seconds left in regulation.

Classic dumb play he'll have to live with his entire career - there's your column summary!

Stop Yer Complaining!

Shank's here to scold you folks that had any problems with yesterday's officiating of the Patriots / Chiefs game:

Patriots fans should not be complaining about officiating

Be better, Patriot fans. All this crying about officiating is embarrassing.

Suck it up. The officials stunk in Sunday’s 23-16 loss to the Chiefs, but we have to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. Folks around the nation are celebrating New England’s late-season woes, and we only make matters worse by blaming it on the officials.

Everybody knows that the entire Patriots dynasty was built on a football lie. Remember the Tuck Rule? Of course you do. The bad rule (which nobody knew about before Jan. 19, 2002) was correctly enforced on that snowy night in Foxborough and it turned Tom Brady’s fumble into an incomplete pass, giving birth to 18 years of Do Your Job, No Days Off, and They Hate Us ’Cause They Ain’t Us. The rule was so bad that it was eventually repealed. Brady’s fumble today would be what it should haven (sic) been that night: a fumble.

Except that it was not a fumble on the day it occurred. Rules are added, changed and repealed with some frequency, so Shank's argument can be used selectively, as he did here. When that fumble happened, I did indeed think that it was a fumble and like the occasional moron that I am, I went right to bed after that play, thinking that it was a fumble. The next morning I read all about it and I was pleasantly stunned at a) what happened and b) that the 'Tuck Rule' was in place, as I didn't recall that particular subtlety of the NFL rulebook at the time.

He goes on from there to 'remind' all of us at how lucky the Patriots have been since that game. While it's hard to argue against that notion in general, I don't agree with Shank that it tips oh so heavily in the Patriots favor.

That said, I'd recommend reading the rest of the column. It's a decent read, because you can see Shank is energized in this column, as he usually is when he gets a chance to write a column after a Patriots loss.

Dishonest And Misleading Headline

The New England Patriots beat the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium last night, 37-31 in overtime. Naturally Shank has hijacked the bandwagon, but the headline for his latest column is what stuck out for me:

Once dissed and dismissed, the Patriots are back in the Super Bowl

Not included in his column is any mention of one of the local newspaper columnists who repeatedly 'dissed and dismissed' the New England Patriots throughout the regular season.

Douchebag AFC Championship Tweets, By Dan Shaughnessy

Expecting something new?

No double score tonight.
Chiefs win toss, defer. Pats to receive.

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) January 20, 2019

A Decent Column By Shank

How many times do you see that said about one of his pieces?

Remember how Shank, in the runup to a major playoff game for one of the Boston pro sports teams, would make an effort to antagonize both fanbases, whether it's Houston or Atlanta in football, or Cleveland in baseball? This is NOT one of those columns.

No one thinks the Patriots suck, they just want them to lose

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tom Brady has it all wrong:

It’s not that America thinks the Patriots will lose. It’s that America wants the Patriots to lose.

The AFC Championship game will be played Sunday night at Arrowhead Stadium, hours before a super blood moon lunar eclipse. It will be a celestial event in every way. Planets are aligned and the whole football world will be watching.

Aren't We All Waiting

...for Shank to bang out another column taking a massive dump on the Patriots after they lose to the Chiefs 42-27 tonight?

We're On To Denver Or Pittsburgh

Shank, notably changing his tune from six days ago yet again, delivers a semi-decent column on this afternoon's game between the Patriots and the Chiefs, with helpful reminders about their travails from last year's Super Bowl run, just in case you forgot :

FOXBOROUGH — After 12 months of ideal gas law, the Wells Report in context, “more likely than not,” warm drinks, and trash cans, the Patriots are right back where they always seem to be at the end of January: They will play in the AFC Championship game for the fifth consecutive winter. A Patriot season that started with Scott Zolak screaming into the headsets of Mike Tomlin and Ben Roethlisberger looks like it might extend all the way to Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, Calif., on Feb. 7.

The Pats punched their ticket to another conference title game with a not-as-close-as-it-looks 27-20 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs at Gillette Stadium on Saturday night. New England will play next Sunday at 3:05 p.m., either at Denver or in Foxborough vs. Pittsburgh, pending the outcome of Sunday’s divisional-round joust between the Broncos and Steelers.

The standard game recap follows - skip it if you watched the game, because there's nothing new or insightful there.

This last paragraph / sentence is curious / stupid:

The New England Patriots, once the joke of the NFL, are now the gold standard of excellence; the best franchise in America’s most popular sport.

He writes this as though it's a recent event. This is simply further evidence that whenever Shank heaps praise on the Patriots, he's not sincere about it.

The Stupid, It Burns - IV

Just in case you missed it the first time - your dumb (second) Dreaded Coin Flip tweet:

Chiefs call tails. Coin comes up tails. Chiefs deferred. So they DO have a chance

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) January 16, 2016

At least we now avoid the Double Score Tweet, so that's nice...

Tough Call, I Know

You could set your watch to this metronome of mediocrity:

As we wait just remember that the Pats have won 28 of the last 36 coin flips. Alex Speier tells me this is a statistical unliklihood.

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) January 16, 2016

UPDATE AT 4:48 PM - Best response so far:

@Dan_Shaughnessy you are a totally unique, profound and original tweeter.

— Al Pica (@Poundstone12) January 16, 2016

Thank You, Captain Obvious

This will look different in a few hours pic.twitter.com/jAEiBAhnFq

— Dan Shaughnessy (@Dan_Shaughnessy) January 16, 2016

Next up - stupid tweets about coin flips and double scores. Stay tuned!

Mr. Manners

Booing is wrong, and people who do it are bad, bad, bad!

So sayeth the Shank, who in a way reminiscent of Miss Manners, expresses his distaste for the fans' lack of civility and his manlove for a Chief lineman who criticized the crowd for piling on after Matt Cassel was knocked out of the game.

Now, let's get one thing straight: The Chiefs fans weren't actually cheering because Cassel got hurt; they were cheering because he would no longer be in the game, manning a club that has gone 22-31 since his arrival from New England prior to the 2009 season. They had a point: Cassel's QB rating is a pedestrian 81% for his career, a mark he's topped only once in the four seasons he's helmed the Chiefs.

But this is where The CHB's hypocrisy switched into overdrive: "I’ve certainly done my share of tweaking and exposing professional athletes or organizations who don’t give an honest effort to live up to their contracts or fulfill the team-fan accord."

Would that be "tweaking" like when he called David Ortiz a sad sack of you-know-what? Was it tweaking when he called Carl Everett "the Ebola virus of the Boston clubhouse?" Or when he wrote “We have rejoiced in the retirement of Keith Foulke?” Would that be "exposing" when he wrote, "Why does America hate Barry Bonds so much? Is it because he's too good?" all while neglecting to mention Bonds' PED use for another five years. Was that exposing when he accused Manny Ramirez, the previous season's World Series MVP, of quitting on the team during a month where he put up a .930 OPS and 6 HRs in 24 games?

No, that would just be the Holy Cross Hypocrite, doing what he does best.