All of that is gone, but these freezing, post-holiday weeks with no playoffs for us still represent the most important stretch of the season.
In 2025, the Patriots are annual NFL losers. Those 13 regular-season losses and four feeble wins mean just about nothing. Almost all the games were tedious and unmemorable.
It’s the offseason that matters most now, which is why the Patriots are a 24/7 topic on every sports platform in our region.
We’ve got nonstop gossip-mill frenzy.
Rookie coach Jerod Mayo was fired 90 minutes after winning New England’s finale — a hideous spectacle featuring teams with zero motivation to win. Two days later, the Patriots whisked minority candidates Byron Leftwich and Pep Hamilton in and out of Fort Foxborough, then announced they’d be interviewing former Pats linebacker Mike Vrabel on Thursday while requesting virtual interviews with Lions coordinators Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn. (Seeing through this facade, Glenn, an African-American, told the Patriots he wasn’t interested.)
“We want to interview as many people as we can,” Kraft said when he took questions Monday.
Great to have Bob’s accountability, but it’s past time to acknowledge that Prince Charles/Jonathan has a huge role in running this team.
Throughout this past week, there’s been every indication the Patriots will anoint favorite-son Vrabel, which will be applauded and also make a farce out of that “interest” in other candidates.
Vrabel checks all the Kraft boxes. A linebacker who occasionally caught touchdown passes, he played here for eight seasons and won three Super Bowls under Bill Belichick. He’s a jacket-wearing member of Kraft’s beloved Patriots Hall of Fame — an honor not granted to Bill Parcells, who saved the franchise — and sat in Kraft’s box during a 2023 Patriots-Bills game while he was coach of the Titans. That’s the same kind of beholdenness that earned Mayo the Patriots job despite zero head coaching experience.
Unlike Mayo, Vrabel has legit NFL head coaching props. He went 54-45 in Tennessee with four winning seasons, including 2019, when he took the Titans to the AFC Championship game. He’s already interviewed with the Jets and Bears, the Saints may want him, and — unlike Detroit’s Johnson — Vrabel can be hired immediately.
If the Patriots’ next coach ends up being Vrabel after a hasty “search,” we’ll have the lasting image of Kraft deftly circumnavigating the NFL’s Rooney Rule by bringing Leftwich and Hamilton in for speed-dating interviews even though neither were in the league this season, nor were considered by any other teams. It’s stunts of this nature that haunt Kraft every time he comes up for Hall of Fame consideration and gets bypassed in favor of long-forgotten contributors from the leather helmet days. (Buddy Parker? Ralph Hay?)
While this drama unfolds, we have the specter of Raiders minority partner Tom Brady reaching out to former teammate Vrabel and possibly even Belichick to gauge their interest in joining the clown show in Las Vegas. College coach Belichick, said to be getting calls from a number of NFL teams (not New England!), has a $10 million buyout in his North Carolina contract.
Yikes.
No wonder there’s so much offseason talk. And we haven’t even touched on the notion of Mayo winning Sunday’s game to defy Kraft, the future of executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf, the Patriots’ considerable draft capital, or their position as the team with most cap money to spend.
Oh, and let’s not forget the already unfolding smear campaign. Did you hear Mayo was playing cards with his players on the team charter home after that awful loss in Arizona? Mon Dieu! It’ll be chicken and beer from Popeyes before you know it.
Strap yourselves in, fans.
The real season is here for the New England Patriots.
The offseason.
▪ Quiz: 1. Name six lefthanded quarterbacks who passed for more than 20,000 yards in their careers; 2. Name five current NFL head coaches with 160 or more regular-season wins. (Answers below.)
▪ If you grew up in the 1960s, you remember when the Red Sox, Patriots, and Bruins were all bad almost every year. And the Celtics were always great. Just like now.
▪ Is Don Sweeney in trouble? The Bruins can’t be thinking about swapping out coaches again.
▪ Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The story floated this past week is that the Red Sox aren’t going to pony-up for free agents because they’re saving their money for Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who might be a free agent at this time next year and reportedly really, really likes the Red Sox.
Wow. Just when you think it can’t get any more absurd. How stupid do the Sox think their fans are?
▪ I love the Detroit Lions. My father-in-law had tickets in the 1950s, when they played in old Tiger Stadium and won the NFL championship in 1957. That great old ballpark — which opened in 1912, same as Fenway — had to be taken down at the end of the 20th century because of (among other reasons) salt used to melt snow and ice in the upper decks for Lions games.
The Lions won only one playoff game, a January 1992 victory over the Cowboys when Detroit was coached by New Bedford-born Wayne Fontes, in the 65 seasons between 1957 and last winter. The Dan Campbell Lions led the 49ers, 24-7, in last year’s NFC Championship game, then succumbed in the blink of an eye. Now, they are the top seed with a first-round bye and a clear path of games at Ford Field before a potential Super Bowl in New Orleans.
If quarterback Jared Goff makes it there, he’ll be asked a lot about his stink bomb when the Patriots shut down his Rams, 13-3, in Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta six years ago.
▪ Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is having a great season, but Denver’s Nikola Jokic has a chance to win his fourth MVP in five years. Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and Larry Bird are the only players to win three MVPs in a row. Russell and LeBron James won four times in five seasons. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won five in seven seasons, and Michael Jordan five in 11.
▪ The popular new film “A Complete Unknown” kindled memories of the unusual connection between Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan and the Celtics.
Born Robert Zimmerman, Dylan grew up in the Iron Range in Hibbing, Minn., which is also the hometown of Kevin McHale. McHale liked to brag about the connection, and in the spring of 1984, Dylan attended a Celtics win over the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. McHale scored 23 points and proclaimed, “I dedicate this game to my main man, Bobby Dylan. Bobby inspired me. He was the key to the game.”
McHale met with Dylan after the game and two days later, under a Globe headline of “One more guy from Hibbing and they’d have had a quorum for a town meeting,” McHale was quoted as saying, “I was too young to know him when I was growing up, but I used to spend a lot of time listening to Bobby croon me away.” Another McHale first: No one else ever referred to Bob Dylan as a “crooner.”
Other famous Hibbing sons include Roger Maris, lawyer/author Vincent Bugliosi of ”Helter Skelter” fame, and American Communist Party leader Gus Hall.
“Gus could really go to his left,” said McHale.
▪ After what we saw last Sunday, we all need to know more about Bazooka Joe Milton. Some nuggets: Milton is said to have thrown a football 70 yards from his knees. Without warming up, he threw a baseball 95 miles per hour. In a 2021 practice at Tennessee, he threw a “go” ball that hit one of the electronic fans in the rafters of the (indoor) Anderson Training Center in Knoxville. Milton and Anquan Boldin are cousins.
▪ Vrabel nugget: The coach-in-waiting was on the other sideline when Brady lost his final game as a Patriot, 20-13, to the Titans in January 2020.
▪ No respect department: This year marks the eighth playoff appearance in the history of the Houston Texans. In every instance, they’ve been scheduled in the non-coveted early Saturday slot on wild-card weekend.
▪ Speaking of the playoffs on TV, it’s always tough on older viewers when the NFL streams any game, especially a playoff game. (Such as Saturday night’s Steelers at Ravens on Amazon Prime.)
▪ I’d have no objections if NBA coaches abandoned their track suits — they all look like Paulie Walnuts sitting outside Satriale’s Pork Store in “The Sopranos” — and went back to Pat Riley’s Giorgio Armani. Or at least a Bill Fitch plaid sport coat.
▪ Magic Johnson last week became the sixth NBA star to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The others are Russell, Abdul-Jabbar, Jordan, Jerry West, and Bob Cousy.
▪ Here’s the 1995 Cleveland Indians everyday lineup: 1. Kenny Lofton, CF; 2. Omar Vizquel, SS; 3. Carlos Baerga, 2B; 4. Albert Belle, LF; 5. Eddie Murray, DH; 6. Jim Thome, 3B; 7. Manny Ramirez, RF; 8. Paul Sorrento, 1B; 9. Sandy Alomar Jr. (or Tony Peña), C. And they still didn’t win the World Series!
▪ Congrats to 90-year-old Bill Cleary, being honored at the Harvard-Yale hockey game Saturday night in Allston. An All-American, Olympian, head coach, and athletic director, Cleary gave Harvard six decades of spectacular service.
▪ Congrats also to Ayer-Shirley high school basketball coach Rick Kilpatrick, who notched his 350th win vs. Tahanto Regional and is at the Garden this weekend for a tournament. Kilpatrick was a longtime coach at Acton-Boxborough.
▪ Here’s hoping Bobby Dalbec hits 35 homers for the White Sox and we get a year of Lobel-inspired, “Why can’t we get players like that?”
▪ Quiz answers: 1. Boomer Esiason, Steve Young, Mark Brunell, Ken Stabler, Michael Vick, Jim Zorn; 2. Andy Reid, Mike Tomlin, Mike McCarthy, John Harbaugh, Sean Payton.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.
