16-0

Admittedly, despite the lack of overarching historical significance yesterday where exciting comebacks are concerned I was more emotionally invested in the Flames’ later one against what in terms of its current personnel and management has to be far and away the most loathsome team in professional sports. But the game on every network in the country yesterday turned out to be an excellent one. And while I would in general have been rooting for the underdog, I’m actually happy the Patriots did it. The underdog thing is less compelling because the teams that could stop the Patriots from winning a championship are as bad or worse — any decent person has to hope they’ll pummel the Cowboys senseless if it comes to that. And I’m especially glad they went undefeated and hope they’ll now win because I’ve never seen any players less gracious about having a record broken than the ’72 Dolphins (who are also the Dolphins, and are based in Florida, so they’re already hateful before their specific odious actions.) In some way it’s understandable because had they not exploited an extremely weak schedule to go undefeated they wouldn’t even be in the discussion of the greatest team ever, but that’s all the more reason to be happy that the regular season record is now shared by a genuinely great team.

Plus, it makes Gregg Easterbrook cry.

…to be clear, I’m using the Csonka quote merely as an illustrative example; cf. also here and here.