Let me remind you of my motto when it comes to sports. And indeed, this is my motto when it comes to most everything else too. It is three letters: A.B.H.
A. - Always
B. - Be
H. - Hatin'
Always Be Hatin'. I hate a lot of things. One of them includes the New England fucking Patriots. There's a lot of things wrong in the world, but the Patriots one of the few we can see corrected. I hope they lose tomorrow. I hope they lose by 200. We can all go to bed after the Daddy Yankee show because Seattle will already be up by 60 at the half.
I'm a born hater, I'm good at hating. Growing up, I hated school, I hated summer camp, I hated going to Synagogue, I hated visiting most relatives, and I hated going outside to play. Today I hate waking up early, I hate my commute to work, I hate every health insurance, I hate how helpless my damn patients are when it comes to this industry, I hate networks, I hate copays, I hate deductibles, I hate premiums, I hate prior authorizations, I hate EOBs, I hate form 10-10172, and I hate my commute home. I hate the government, I hate the cops, I hate the useless cowardly media that pretends all this is perfectly normal. The president and endless reductions in how much Medicare Part D covers and crooked-ass Cigna Health Plans who love to deny every claim just for the fun of it are not going anywhere.
The Patriots are going somewhere. Win or lose, they're going away after tomorrow night and won't be back until September. Goodbye and good riddance. The Patriots have earned nothing and deserve even less than that. Always Be Hatin' Edition Super Bowl LX: Fuck the Patriots.
As you may know, I'm a Broncos fan. A real freak about it actually. I got Broncos sneakers and a Broncos shirt and Broncos socks and Broncos gloves and three jerseys. For a good chunk of 2025, I had this team in lieu of a personality. Patriots fans, you know what I'm going to say already. You may stop reading now. I'm not sure if you were welcome here to begin with.
Any football team is not inherently more virtuous than any other. I have no reason to love this team over any other, it is just a fact. The Denver Broncos are owned by Rob Walton. Some people were born on third plate and think they hit a triple, Rob was born on home plate and thinks he's a slugger. His dad founded Walmart, and that means thanks largely to a work force the American tax payer subsidies in food stamps and Medicaid support (until we take that away too) Robt got to buy himself a football team. One of our co-owners is Condoleezza Rice, one of the Bush Administration's chief ghouls who should be only watching football games from a prison cell in The Hague. (Remember A.B.H.)
Still, this is what I've arbitrarily chosen to love, NFL football and specifically the team with horsies on the helmet. For a fan, the Broncos have given more blessings than many other teams, some have histories that go back centuries and have only 11 playoff appearances. Not my team. We've been to eight Super Bowls and won three. Plus, we're as good as ever. I predicted my team would be very very good this season, I correctly guessed we'd have a 14-3 record, and called it back in May too! By all objective measures, the 2025-26 Broncos were one of the best teams in football, they won twelve games in a row at one point, only lost four games total, and most of those loses were by merely a field goal. They were a remake of the classic 2015 Broncos team, which happened to win at the very field this Super Bowl is taking place at. The decade-later '25 Broncos came within three points of making their ninth Super Bowl appearance. I got to watch the horse team have easily one of their top 10 best seasons ever.
The Broncos since drafting Bo Nix have returned to the franchise they have been historically: reliable, beloved, and fearsome. Since that last Super Bowl season the Broncos have decided they are a defense-first team and offense second. This has waxed and waned over the year, but they had one of the best defenses in the NFL in 2025. People say the Texans defense was better, I don't care because we beat that team in a gritty defensive battle. Under Bo Nix, the Broncos had an offense that wasn't world beating, but could always be relied upon to stay in the game. If you're down a field goal at the end of the game, Nix would get you that field goal. If you needed a touch down in the fourth quarter, he'd get you the TD. He delivered in 17 out of 18 games - with only one failure against Jacksonville being the exception. Nobody is perfect, and the 2025 Broncos didn't need to be. The Giants almost destroyed the Broncos outright, and for their efforts they were rewarded with a 33-point fourth quarter comeback which was so incredible the Giants simply ceased to be a football team for the rest the season. It was that bad of a loss.
Denver is a notoriously difficult place to play, with its altitude and also, the fanbase. I got to go to Mile High Stadium for the first time these playoffs and the whole building shook as the fans cheered. You did not merely watch that game, it was an aerobic experience of screaming, stomping, and keeping up energy. You might think it was always that that way. This team has always been good and the fans had always been rewarded. In fact, no.
I suffered for almost eight years of misery and losing records after Payton Manning retired and left us with no QB, no coach, and no future. When Vic Fangio was coaching this team, Denver was a team you were safe to forget about entirely. Nothing we did mattered or seemed like it would ever matter. I can still recite our carousel of loser QBs by memory: Siemian, Lynch, Osweiler, Keenum, Flacco, Lock, Bridgewater, and Wilson. You make the AFC Championship two years after you've hit rock bottom in a 70-20 loss after a Russell Wilson trade supposedly torpedo'd the franchise for the entire decade, and you know what, it's a good time.
Should be capped by a Super Bowl, of course. This was a blessed season and it felt like destiny. Until something went wrong. The Patriots have our place in the Super Bowl, but they're not what went wrong at all. They're a legitimate good team but in terms of a Super Team, illegamate lucky fuckers, nothing else.
And hey, it isn't like the Patriots haven't had some troubles... just three years with losing records and missing the playoffs until immediately turning around with your new coach, Mike Vrabel and a near-MVP QB in Drake Maye. Only three years. High school lasts longer than that. Oh yeah, you've earned nothing, I forgot. The Jets haven't been to the playoffs since 2011 and won't be back until 2041 the way they're going. That's the kind of thing the Patriots specifically deserve.
Football moves quickly, so already these Patriots are not the Tom Brady Patriots. All those guys are gone: Brady is too much of a coward to even root for his old organization, his disgusting coach Belichick is banging a lady who wasn't even born when he went to his first Super Bowl, Edelman is on baking shows, and Gronk is a talking head who cannot pronounce player names. The last remaining active player on the team from Brady's time was long snapper Joe Cardona, who was cut last April. That means the only one left is the owner, massage parlor enthusiast Robert Kraft, who like all owners, is total scum and basically a net negative to his organization.
But just because a generation has passed doesn't mean these Patriots do not share the colors with the team that was so annoying. They were over-exposed, Deflategating, Spygating, MAGA hat-wearing, and the arch villains of professional sports for twenty years. The Patriots were, and always will be the team that made us all relive the nightmare of the 2016 election just months later. They represented Trump and White grievance in the Super Bowl when they stunned and defeated the majority Black city of Atlanta. Bill Belichick is the most accomplished coach in NFL history by some measures and missed the Hall of Fame this year largely due to being a nasty, actively-miserable, asshole to the entire world for decades. I hope he never gets in. Even Brady got sick of him, and Brady is a barely-human psychopathic fitness weirdo, he's what happens when Patrick Bateman learns to play sports. Pats fans got to have nine Super Bowls under this organization, and you won six of them. You won your division every damn year. People love the Buffalo Bills and Josh Allen for winning the AFC East, not because they're the Bills, but specifically because they're Not-You. Eli Manning, an otherwise merely good QB, might make the Hall of Fame specifically for beating you in the Super Bowl, because everybody hated you.
Stefon Diggs has a court date next week for strangling a woman, he got to have it delayed because he's a star WR in the Super Bowl for the Patriots. Cool, classy stuff.
We finally got rid of the damn Chiefs after they terrorized the league in your absence, Mahomes' playoff hopes died in Denver weeks before he tore his ACL, and this what we traded them in for? This fucking replay? Imagine if after Trumpism ends, Bush will just retake the White House as if he never left it. Better things are just not possible, huh? All we can hope for is the new bad or the old bad?
And you know, I'd be fine with it if I could say you earned it. But, no, you didn't. You're in the Super Bowl on a fluke, a technicality, absurd luck that could not be less deserved by any other franchise in football.
The Broncos beat the Bills, and beat them fairly. (Though I respect your misery, Buffalo, your whining about that interception has gone on so long that you've proven you're better at A.B.H. than even I am.) Then forty minutes later we discover Bo Nix broke an ankle. Just on the cusp of the great highlight of the 2020s for this team, a signature win that proved Denver were not frauds, where we beat a team largely thought to have earned its way into the Super Bowl by fiat thanks to the Chiefs missing the post-season, we get everything taken from us. I'm not saying Bo Nix is better than the Patriots ubermench Drake Maye - not this season. But did the Patriots beat the Broncos? No, they beat a Broncos. They beat a Jarrett Stidham Broncos, the back-up, which means nothing. I am not impressed by anybody beating Stidham, a nobody more anonymous than even the Carousel of Losers I mentioned some paragraphs ago. Even less impressed if you won by three points and your "MVP" was statistically trash in that game and had one scoring drive. You should have beaten us by 30 if you were worth a shit.
And don't talk to me about the weather. I was at that game. It was pleasant in the first quarter, any football team can operate in the cold. Stidham threw a TD against your defense, Patriots, so unless you're telling me the Broncos defense was just that much more special or your QB was less so, I don't see any excuse for playing like garbage, which is exactly what the narrative would be about Maye all off-season if our coach hadn't been too clever by half and hadn't kicked a field goal. Marcus Mariota, a has-been afterthought, played better against these Broncos in the freezing cold, I was at that game too. Drake Maye put up stats against Denver that resembled the Jets' disaster led by Justin Fields - yet another game I went to, in England, which was awesome. Back to Pats @ Broncos, it snowed like dogshit for the final third of that Championship, but all it did was freeze in place a narrow, fluke of a victory in dodgy circumstances. I walked back to my hotel room a mile and half away shivering and miserable and slipping in the inches of sleek, just to make sure the hate and resentment could really sink it. Make sure my very pores were saturated with it. Hatred is wot drives me.
The Broncos lost that game, the Patriots didn't win it. You're an asterisk because the best team in the conference got unlucky, and the second-best team in the conference came up short against us. You have one good win against the already-defeated and limping Herbert Chargers. CJ Stroud was a turnover machine that ended the Texans season, and anybody watching his game could have seen that coming, he was just as good against the Steelers. The Patriots do not have the bonafides of a serious contender. This is the subpar, secondary product we get when injuries decide the fates of teams.
It'd be cool if I could say that all this all will be simply done over and done properly next season. But seasons do not get to be xeroxed. This was a Broncos season that felt like magic the entire time. I don't hate that, it was incredible, unlikely wins after unlikely wins. There was the joy of hearing sports pundits grumble that Bo Nix, a QB they never respected, was beating and in fact, out-playing the mighty Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes. It feels exhausting to think about now, having to do it all over again because we got robbed at the end. This league moves quickly. The Jags made the AFC Championship in 2017 and never got back, the Bills made it last year and are starting to implode, even the invincible Chiefs' future is murky and depends on Mahomes' recovery. I hope he's terrible next season. A.B.H.
I'd have loved to have seen the 2025 Broncos in the Super Bowl, this scrappy unlikely team making miracles happen. But that will never happen, instead we have the Patriots, unlikeable and unworthy. The only thing to hope now is that the Broncos get better this off-season. The Broncos can keep their awesome defense and hopefully finally get Nix the offensive weapons he needs, guys who won't drop a million passes and can push for yards after the catch. Hopefully have a consistent run game. I feel like I've been begging for a good running back since CJ Anderson left. It has been so long since the Broncos had a great Tight End that I think Shannon Sharpe in the 90s could very well be the last one.
We'll settle this with New England properly next season, with a healthy Bo Nix in their house. I'll be at that game.
For now, all history will remember is that the Patriots got back to the Super Bowl, and then hopefully get their asses torn out in hysterical fashion. The Seahawks are a really really good this year, clearly the best team in football. But football is random and bouncy and stupid, as injust as the world around it. I bet the game is closer than it should be. I bet the Patriots even get the lead after a turnover in their favor. However, I don't need to be a good sport about it, don't be a good loser or even a good winner, Always Be Hatin', remember that.
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