Beer and football XI — the new league year

The beer: True North Garuda Coffee Milk Stout
The commentary: Item! Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

So this is football, everyday football, for almost every other fanbase. Uncertainty, denial, malaise, a looming and socially distant draft in which the idea of selecting a quarterback is not relegated to later rounds for novelty backup purposes but rather a frenzied urgency to secure team legitimacy in the near and long terms. Complaints about reaching too early for special-teamers and game-day inactives will pale in comparison to incoming QBs who do no better than, say…

Rohan Davey
Kliff Kingsbury
Matt Cassel*
Kevin O'Connell
Zac Robinson
Ryan Mallett
Jimmy Garoppolo*
Jacoby Brissett
Danny Etling
Jarrett Stidham

Asterisks denote two—two!—non-Brady, non-Stidham (too early to judge) hits out of eight. "How do we feel… about a Bill Belichick… draft strategeeeee?? Awwww…" shit. Every team may have passed on Brady through six rounds of the 2000 draft but Belichick was right there with them. Brady wasn't even the first player they took in the sixth round! Take a bow, Antwan Harris.

Who knows, maybe Stidham is the man, the answer, and no presumed top-tier quarterback will be drafted tonight. (Count on at least a late-rounder.) Instead, have we an offensive lineman to look forward to? A safety? These are the building blocks of the future. The stable, boring building blocks. (On that note, I wouldn't mind trading Thuney for a second-rounder. Since when should a guard be one of the most expensive players on the team? Unless you bump him to left tackle, move Wynn to right and move Cannon to Detroit.) How about a tight end? Just twist the knife already. My reaction when a coworker messaged me about the Gronk trade was to hope the Pats held out for a first because why not? What I didn't realize were the salary-cap complications had Gronk been reinstated to the Pats roster. What in the worldwide fuck.

Was Seth Wickersham right? Probably. Brady and Belichick did win only one of three Super Bowls since then. As a Patriots fan—a real one, not one of these online jamokes—it's hard not to side with one or the other. Indeed, I wish that Brady were still our quarterback and I don't think Belichick can win much without him, certainly not this year. The terrifyingly shrewd guy was off by eight years, four Super Bowl appearances and three titles but that future, "our future," was inevitable, even if Edelman developed into a stud. Let's hope he and James White don't also get traded to Tampa. Their collective will staves off the fall.

Up next: A new era under heavy quarantine. Cheers?