Ah, the simple joys of preseason fauxball are back.
The I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter of sports.
The decaf, low calorie, polyunsaturated, non-dairy, gluten-free, non-GMO, no-sugar-added substitute for actual football.
And for us simple New England folk, it can’t have come at a better time.
So take all this with that in mind.
(Note: It better not.
Or else we’re all just wasting our time here.)
You’ve got to look at this like a Bob Ross painting early on in the episode.
–A few takeaways we can feel genuinely good about are the rookies.
Christian Gonzalez got a fair amount of reps, both on defense and special teams.
But so far, so good.
And I already respect his eyeblack game.
Repeatedly you saw him not bite on misdirections.
Not get suckered in by dive action on plays that were actually designed rollouts.
He kept his edge when called upon and chased QBs out of the pocket on a couple of occasions.
–If they’re smart, the 99 Restaurant will have his agent on the phone by this morning.
If he is, so far, so good.
In Philly, he’d move around the secondary from one snap to the next.
Now he’s doing the same in Foxboro, just from one season to the next.
I would’ve thought he’d switch to blue hair by now.
But it’s obvious the green was never and Eagles thing, just an aesthetic choice.
And it works for him.
–I’ve already gone on way too long to not address the story of the night.
Make no mistake, he looked impressive as hell.
We love mobile quarterbacks.
And that’s been true my entire football-viewing life.
So we get way out over our skis on a guy with Cunningham’s skillset.
Let me illustrate with an example.
In 2001 I went to training camp in Smithfield, RI.
And there I spotted no less than a couple of dozen Michael Bishop jerseys.
Bishop used to make plays like Cunningham did all the time.
To this day I call him the best August player I ever saw.
But those two dozen people who’d shelled out - what?
A few weeks later, he was in Canada.
And got released by that team.
So let’s slow our roll on Cunningham.
I love the thoughts of what Bill O’Brien might be able to do with him.
Get him the ball in space, like Josh McDaniels did with Cordarelle Patterson.
Make use of his ability to make guys miss like he did on that touchdown and so on.
Perhaps a Taysom Hill jot down role.
An NFL system it is NOT.
Let’s proceed cautiously on this guy.
He had limited time to throw - and by “limited” I mean fractions of a second.
So he wisely took the checkdowns, outs and sit routes that were available to him.
And got the ball out quickly while taking care of it and not forcing anything.
He’s definitely been passed by Demario Douglas in Mac Jones Circle of Trust from Day 1.
And more recently been losing reps and targets to Keyshon Boutte.
But if he can prove he’s reliable on these types of throws, that’ll do just super.
I can’t imagine what I’d do with this thing.
You’d need something in super widescreen to do it justice.Dunkirk, maybe?Lawrence of Arabiaperhaps?
Some Stanley Kubrick thing?
All I know is I wouldn’t take up both ends of it with ads for Big Pharma.
Which is why I don’t own a two acre screen, I suppose.
Someone’s got to pay for it.
If Megan Rapinoe had bent a kick like that, the USNWT would still be playing.
Everything else is secondary to that.
But there were enough positives to give us something to look forward to as we go on.
What more can we ask of a game none of us will remember watching a month from now?
