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unlucky thirteen
Dec. 18th, 2024 12:52 pmThe good news is that the Chiefs improved to 13-1 and still control the one seed! The bad news is that my poor baby Pat has sprained an ankle again. We already had one ankle scare a month and a half ago against the Bucs, although he refused to come out of that game and afterwards Andy told the media that he has, and I quote, “the loosest ankles in America,” which honestly sounds like an old-timey way of calling him a slut. This time it was bad enough that allowed himself to be removed from remainder of the game, albeit ungraciously, but he says that it’s not as bad as the sprain in the divisional round against the Jags in 2023 that he played through in the AFCCG and then the Super Bowl.
The most annoying thing is that it didn’t need to happen in the first place, like, at all. The Chiefs were already playing with a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency offensive line with Joe Thuney sliding over to left tackle because all the actual tackles are too hurt or too untrusted at the moment. It was suboptimal, but combined with some nifty play calling that had Pat constantly dancing out of danger, they were definitely getting away with it in the first half. It helped that Jameis, being Jameis, absolutely could not stop turning the ball over, so while the Chiefs offense was literally being pressured, in the larger, more metaphorical sense, there was very little pressure on them at all. In the second half, even though the Browns defense clamped down on the run and Pat was dropping back a million miles, chucking incompletion after incompletion and getting knocked around constantly, the Chiefs were still up 21-7 with five minutes left to play when Andy made the fateful decision to go for it on fourth and three. Pat dropped back to attempt yet another pass and got folded up like an origami crane.
He wants to play on Saturday because of course he does. It's not like I don't believe he can play through a sprained ankle, because, I mean, I've already seen him win a Super Bowl on a sprained ankle in 2023. I just didn't particularly want to test whether that feat was repeatable, especially since we're already rerunning the minimum viable receiver talent experiment of 2024. Doing both at once feels…challenging. Especially since then we have the accursed Netflix Christmas Day game on an even shorter week.
The most annoying thing is that it didn’t need to happen in the first place, like, at all. The Chiefs were already playing with a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency offensive line with Joe Thuney sliding over to left tackle because all the actual tackles are too hurt or too untrusted at the moment. It was suboptimal, but combined with some nifty play calling that had Pat constantly dancing out of danger, they were definitely getting away with it in the first half. It helped that Jameis, being Jameis, absolutely could not stop turning the ball over, so while the Chiefs offense was literally being pressured, in the larger, more metaphorical sense, there was very little pressure on them at all. In the second half, even though the Browns defense clamped down on the run and Pat was dropping back a million miles, chucking incompletion after incompletion and getting knocked around constantly, the Chiefs were still up 21-7 with five minutes left to play when Andy made the fateful decision to go for it on fourth and three. Pat dropped back to attempt yet another pass and got folded up like an origami crane.
He wants to play on Saturday because of course he does. It's not like I don't believe he can play through a sprained ankle, because, I mean, I've already seen him win a Super Bowl on a sprained ankle in 2023. I just didn't particularly want to test whether that feat was repeatable, especially since we're already rerunning the minimum viable receiver talent experiment of 2024. Doing both at once feels…challenging. Especially since then we have the accursed Netflix Christmas Day game on an even shorter week.
