Now Rob Parker is Getting Abused by Fredo Mangini for Saying Brady Sucks
One thing you should understand about the blogging business is that when you sit down on any given day to burp the alphabet into your keyboard, you never know what kind of curveball the universe is going to throw you.
I mean, get a load of this surreal twist. Monday afternoon I get home from covering Patriots practice and post a literary beatdown of Rob Parker for saying (for the millionth time) Tom Brady is a terrible quarterback who’s too old to play tackle football. Tuesday morning, I write another post asking rhetorically if I can continue my 13-year tradition of calling Eric Mangini “Fredo” for betraying his friend and mentor, or is that now an ethnic slur. And in no time at all, I’ve got Mangini on with Parker, fighting the same fight as me. That is some bizarre, “Black Mirror” style irony. Almost too unlikely to be dismissed as mere coincidence.
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A few takeaways here. First and most obviously, Mangini is still, after all these years, hurt about how he got frozen out by the Patriots after he betrayed them. He’s a hollowed out, vaguely Eric Mangini-shaped shell of a man, filled with nothing but remorse for his actions. Forced to wander the Earth being shunned by polite society for hurting the man who mentored a 23 year old Browns ballboy into becoming an NFL coordinator, only to stab him in the back by leaving for the Jets job and unleashing the scourge of Spygate upon an unsuspecting world. Fredo has said repeatedly he never wanted Spygate to blow up the way it did. But the damage has been permanent.
Second, all his defending of Tom Brady against a low-rated, talent-free, knockoff store brand Shannon Sharpe like Rob Parker isn’t going to get his old friend to answer the door when he shows up on the porch. When Mangini’s face appears on the doorbell camera, Belichick’s expression doesn’t change. He could steal every Amazon package out there and the man he wronged wouldn’t burn the calories it takes to get out of his recliner. He’ll go to his grave without ever getting that “Hug it out, bitch” moment he’s been dreaming of.
But I will say I appreciate his effort. While #InconsistentRobParker isn’t great, it’s not terrible either. Calling this lightweight fraud out of holding the winningest QB of all time to a different standard than Dak Prescott (1-2 in the postseason) is inspired. And I’ll add that using Brady’s 2017 as proof that 2018 Brady fell off some cliff is laughable. Because with 3/4 of Julian Edelman, Gronk at half his health, no Danny Amendola, and Josh Gordon coming and going like a temp, here was the precipitous drop off from one season to the next:
Is Parker right that Brady was down in some good categories and up in some of the bad ones? Sure. By marginal degrees. From a season in which he won the MV fucking P of the NF fucking L. When he lead the league in Passing Yards and YPG. And still, across the board, he matched or was above his career averages. The career that has been the most successful in football history.
Look at the numbers or watch the tape. I know Tom Brady hasn’t had some huge dropoff. You know it. Rob Parker knows it. And even the man who’s been forever shamed into exile by the man he owes his career to knows it. Is that enough to get me to stop calling him Fredo? No. But it’s step in the right direction. Next time he might want to try open palm-slapping some sense into Parker’s head and we’ll see.