Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst

As Angela said, for the second year in a row now, a Patriots season-opening win is overshadowed by terrible badness. The true status of Tom Brady's knee is still unknown as of yet but everybody in the world is saying it's a torn ACL and he's done for the year. That fully sucks giant rhino ass for us loyal Patriots fans. (Master of the Obvious, that's me.)

The best case scenario is that the MSM is wrong (that's never happened before right?) and its not a season ending injury for Tom (hey, I can hope). At the very least though, I think we can safely assume he'll be out for the foreseeable future. The Pats are bringing in some veteran free-agent QB's including former Bucs starting QB, Chris Simms, today. Simms showed a lot of potential before he got hurt (ruptured spleen) a few seasons back.

If Brady is out (arg), whoever his long-term replacement is will still have an excellent group of receivers, a solid o-line and a very good running game to work with. A lot of comparisons are being drawn to the 2001 season when Brady stepped in for Bledsoe. I think that the 2008 Patriots are a much better team offensively than the '01 team was, so Brady's eventual replacement will have plenty of weapons to work with. His job will be to take advantage of the personnel around him, manage the game and keep the screw-ups to a minimum.

Defensively, not much changes, except that the D will probably not get a lot of games with 21 + point cushions to work with. The D is going to need to step up and hold opposing offenses down. There will assuredly be several more games than expected this season where we will count on the D to win it for us. Keeping K.C. off of the scoreboard with one minute to play and first and goal at the 5 yard line was a good starting point yesterday.

The mantra of this era's Patriots Dynasty has always been 'team'. With Brady out The Pats will once again need to fully embrace that ideal. They get to legitimately have that 'nobody thinks we can do it' chip back on their shoulder as well.

One morsel of good news is that looking around the league, The Colts and Chargers both lost yesterday. With the exception of Pittsburgh, a lot of the teams people were picking to be at the top had bad days yesterday. Yes, it's only week one, but week one counts and I'm already thinking about playoff seeding.

GO PATS