The Buscher

Keith Lee, Rhea Ripley, and Mark Andrews are in

Trent Seven is in

Sounds like Washington had already decided to fire Gruden after the Giants game but they didn't see any value in sacrificing his replacement to the Pats.

I feel like Dan Quinn can't be too far behind him.

Congratulations Patriots on winning homefield advantage through the AFC playoffs.

Most likely the ratings bring down year over year for Thursdays. Granted the ratings for Thursday games is still higher than anything else on TV that night, but they could clearly see nobody wanted to watch two awful teams. That said, there will still be some stinkers as I believe the rule about every team getting at least one Thursday game is still in place.

This is a rare year I’d be fine with the Yankees winning it all. For starters, no way do I want to see division rivals (Braves and Nats) win it. But beyond that, they’ve had to overcome a ridiculous amount of injuries and it’s not like these are the 2000s “buy everyone” Yankees.

Daniel Jones’ statline doesn’t look pretty today. But he was facing a great defense, had no running game which meant the Vikings could send extra rushers every play, and the receivers dropped a ton of passes. His only real bad mistake was overthrowing an open Sterling Shepard in the end zone. This season is just about letting him learn. And with an unwinnable game on short rest against the Pats coming on Thursday he’ll need to learn that sometimes you just need to take your lumps and move on.

Steelers win the OT coin toss and elect to kick. There’s something you don’t see every day.

In the world of “kickers who won’t have jobs next week”, Cairo Santos has missed four field goals today.

I don’t know why Giants fans were calling into WFAN acting like the outlook for the season is different after two wins. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Giants defense is back to looking horrible. They only looked good last week because Washington doesn’t have an NFL-level offense. Kirk Cousins looks like a Hall of Famer against this team. When you have a defense this bad, you can only win in one of two ways: play a team with a broken offense (Washington) or win an offensive shootout that also requires some breaks (Bucs and their missed FGs). They’ll win a few games against abysmal teams on their schedule, but that’s about all you can expect. The season is about hoping Danny Dimes plays well so they can focus the 2020 offseason entirely on defense.

Another ridiculously backloaded schedule day. Ten early games, two late games. Almost certainly has to do with the Packers and Cowboys having fans all across the country.

The Twins should’ve been forced to give up their spot to Cleveland as soon as the Yankees were locked in as the 2 seed.

Yankees/Twins is the only playoff series that felt like a foregone conclusion going in, even more than Astros/Rays. You can say the Yankees padded their record against the Orioles but just look at the Twins who had two 100+ loss teams in their division and a losing record against teams over .500. Toss in the franchise pressure of getting clowned by the Yankees in the playoffs every time they make it and yeah. They'd be lucky to even win a game this series.

Everytime I hear Colt McCoy I think back to Madden 11 where I ended up facing the Browns in the Super Bowl one season. Game went to OT, I missed a FG on my first possession and the Browns then drove down field for a walkoff FG. One of the few times I didn't mind losing in Madden just because of the absurdity of Colt McCoy holding up a Browns jersey with Obama.

Prospective managers are attracted to a controllable young core of hitters. Here's the team control for the Mets' young players: Alonso, McNeil, JD Davis, Dom Smith - 5 years Rosario - 4 years Nimmo - 3 years Conforto - 2 years Plus a strong 1-4 in the rotation anchored by the soon to be 2x Cy Young Award winner. It's by no means a perfect situation (ownership, Cano for four more years, trying to fix Diaz and Familia), but to say it's the worst available job in baseball is stupid.

Carlos Beltran openly expressed wanting to manage two years ago when he retired and was the runner-up for the Yankees job. He's apparently turned down an interview opportunity with the Padres and a source close to him has said the is no chance he returns to the Mets. Still plenty of openings out there if he's waiting for the right situation but straight up turning down the Padres with their loaded system has me thinking he's decided against managing at all. He's still got his baseball academy to run.

Jets gave Darnold all of their first team reps this week despite him not being cleared for contact due to his spleen, and are now acting blindsided that doctors have ruled him out for Sunday. The hell were they expecting? A high school player died a few years ago after taking a hard hit to the midsection over a month after having mono. Expecting Darnold to return in three weeks is just reckless.

Clay Matthews flagged for yet another phantom roughing the passer call.

That whole thing with trying to draw the other team offsides with a hard count on 4th and short. Probably works once a year around the whole league yet teams still try it in every other game.

Stefan Diggs reportedly wants to be traded. Four games into a five-year contract.

The team played hard for Mickey, I'll give him that. He was firmly on the hot seat 10 games under .500 at the break, and when a manager has lost the clubhouse it's super easy for the team to just play out the string and ensure the guy gets canned. But they went on a nice run and finished 10 games over .500. But this team could've made the playoffs if not for his horrendous in-game management throughout the year, specifically with the bullpen. That it took him until three weeks left in the season to remove Diaz from the closer role after he'd been getting lit up all year is astounding. All that said, I'm not optimistic that the team will bring in the best candidate, and that would be Girardi. It doesn't figure to be a super active offseason, with so many young players hitting arbitration for the first time the projected payroll next year is already way higher than this year without making any moves. So if their big financial splash is Girardi I think the fanbase would be fine with that. But even still, I don't know that I buy the Mets being willing to dole out $5 million a year to a manager when they can hire some guy like Joe Espada for less than $1 million, even though it puts them right back at square one.

Mets fire Mickey Callaway

Shad Khan has said that the Jaguars have no plans on trading Jalen Ramsey. Reportedly they turned down a first and second round pick from the Eagles.

If they have to have two Wild Cards (and they shouldn’t), it really should be that the lower seed has to win two games while the higher seed just needs to win one, unless they have identical records. Wouldn’t prevent the rest of the playoffs from starting on time.