Standing Pat

The quarterback, widely considered to be the best in New England Patriots history, is knocked out for the season with a devastating injury. A lightly-regarded backup, who was a late-round draft pick and who has almost no live game experience, is pressed into service. The Patriots go on to win the game, but the outlook for the rest of the season appears bleak. The team will almost certainly have to rely heavily on its running game, but the running game leaves much to be desired - in the prior year, no running back approached 1,000 yards rushing or scored more than 6 TDs.

The year, of course, is 2001, and Drew Bledsoe has just suffered internal injuries from a hit by New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis. Tom Brady took over the team and efficiently executed conservative game plans week after week. The team won 11 regular-season games and made an improbable run through the playoffs to defeat the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl.

Can the Patriots hope to catch lightning in a bottle again? It is true that Matt Cassel hasn't started a non-exhibition game since high school. At USC, he backed up two Heisman trophy winners, first Carson Palmer then Matt Leinart, so as far as we know he was the third best college quarterback in the country and was just stuck behind the only two players better than he was. In any event, Bill Belichick and Josh McDaniels should be able to adjust their game plan from week-to-week to play to Matt Cassel's strengths, assuming Belichick and McDaniels are able to identify any such strengths. The rest of the team is solid, though the defense may be a little suspect. Sure would be nice to have an Aaron Rodgers ready to step in, but the Pats have focused on developing other areas of the team and have pretty much neglected the backup quarterback position. One the one hand, that makes sense, as Tom Brady hadn't missed a start in something like 7 years. However, I consider that streak to be somewhat fluky, as Brady was listed as "Probable" to play each week on the team's injury report; apparently Brady has been nursing a right shoulder injury for his entire career. In NFL parlance, if a player is listed as Probable he has only a 75% chance of playing that week, so it is pretty lucky that the other 25% never happened and Brady was always able to play.
What can we really expect from Matt Cassel? Well, according to the Madden 2009 player ratings, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are the two best QBs in the game, each with a rating of 99/100. Brady also scores a 99/100 in a stat called "Importance." I don't own the game so I don't know what that means, but I'm guessing it would be a bad thing to lose a player with an Importance rating of 99 to a major knee injury. Matt Cassel's overall Madden rating is a 76/100, so he is equally as "good" as Andrew Walter, and not as good as John Beck, who rates a 78/100. Not a whole hell of a lot to hang your hat on.

I expect the Pats will remain competitive all year, and that they will make the playoffs, perhaps with a 10-6 record. Tony Kornheiser is on record as saying the Pats without Tom Brady are the Kansas City Chiefs. Maybe that is accurate, seeing as how the Chiefs were in a position to tie Sunday's game late in the 4th quarter. But as we all know, Tony Kornheiser is an idiot who spends way too much time talking about his fantasy team. He is so bad and annoying as an announcer that I watched tonight's MNF contest between the Packers and the Vikings with the sound muted. I wish he'd go back to his day job, as co-host of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, and then I wish he'd get fired from his day job, and then I wish he'd get hit by a bus as he is walking out of the TV studio carrying his fern and paperweights.

This news more or less ruins the NFL season for me. I am much more interested in the NFL than in any other sport, and much more interested in the Pats than in any other team. I even got a new Pats shirt for the season. I'll still root for the Pats, and will still watch them while wearing the new shirt, but it will be hard to get as emotionally invested in this season, especially since I was a little tentative after attending last season's shocking Super Bowl loss. And I can take no solace in my primary fantasy football team this year. Not only did I draft a terrible team, but I drafted a terrible team full of players I dislike. My team in my brother's league is much better, but my first round draft pick in that league was one Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, so you can imagine how that season is going to go.

Some vaguely interesting ideas have been floated about, such as Daunte Culpepper signing with the Patriots. However, we need to think a little more outside the box here. The Patriots need to re-sign Drew Bledsoe and name him the starter. Drew's only been out of the league for a year and he's only 36, so he's probably not in terrible physical shape. Then, Belichick and McDaniels will call only passing plays and will instruct the offensive linemen not to actually block anyone (i.e. the coaches should tell all the offensive linemen whatever they told Matt Light before the Super Bowl last year). When Drew Bledsoe gets hurt, Matt Cassel will become a star. After all, it worked for Tom Brady and Tony Romo.

P.S. I'm guessing this guy is having second thoughts, or if he's really hardcore he's scheduling elective reconstructive knee surgery: