The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Nick Effing Wright

Posted on | December 29, 2021 | Comments Off on Nick Effing Wright

Nick Wright (left) has a crush on Patrick Mahomes (right)

If Satan were a sports commentator, he’d be Nick Wright of Fox Sports. And if Patrick Mahomes were gay, Nick Wright would be his boyfriend.

Any liberal who thinks Fox News is biased should turn the channel over to Fox Sports sometime and see what real bias looks like. Nick Wright, a Kansas City native who, so far as anyone knows, never played a minute on any organized sports team, might be entertaining when he’s talking about baseball or some other sport, but when it comes to football, he’s a total fanboy for the Kansas City Chiefs. Nick Wright is as objective about the NFL as my teenage daughter is about Harry Styles.

And when he starts talking about Patrick Mahomes, it’s like gay porn.

Why should I care? Because this evil clown — he’s Satanic, I tell you — has spent the past season slagging Mac Jones, and the source of his bias is obvious. You see, the departure of Tom Brady from New England opened the window by which the Kansas City Chiefs (and Nick’s boyfriend Patrick Mahomes) could make it to the Super Bowl. So if the Patriots’ first-round draft pick out of Alabama turned into the greatest rookie quarterback in NFL history, this would have put a damper on Nick Wright’s hope for another AFC championship for his beloved Chiefs. Therefore, Nick has been deriding Jones’ abilities all season long, because he doesn’t want to see New England return to its accustomed AFC dominance. Any intelligent person can see this, but the executives at Fox Sports either (a) are extraordinarily stupid or (b) just think it’s great programming to have this Kansas City fanboy on TV five days a week.

Maybe fans of other teams hate Nick Wright as much as I have come to hate him this season — when the Patriots drafted Jones, they thereby recruited me as a fan — but I think it’s New England that is Wright’s personal obsession. He hates the Patriots the way Joy Reid hates Donald Trump, because if New England is playing at championship level, the Chiefs are doomed to also-ran status. Go back to the 2019 AFC championship game where Brady and the Pats beat KC 37-31 in overtime, with Nick Wright’s boyfriend getting sacked four times. That was also the last time the Chiefs lost to New England. What inspires Nick Wright’s fear and loathing of Mac Jones is the nightmare of the Patriots once again becoming a permanent obstacle to Kansas City’s Super Bowl hopes.

It’s possible to be both biased and honest. Nobody who knows me would expect me to be objective about the University of Alabama, no more than I could be objective about my wife or my children. As a lifelong Crimson Tide fan, I’m clearly prejudiced against Auburn (or Georgia, or whatever other team may stand between ’Bama and a national championship). Because I am consciously aware of my own prejudice, however, I am capable of the kind of objectivity that prevents me either from ignoring Alabama’s faults or from unfairly slagging the Tide’s opponents.

Is Bryce Young really all that and a stack of pancakes? Eh, he sure didn’t look like it for the first three quarters of that Auburn game. But he led the Tide to a decisive victory over the Bulldogs in the SEC title game and won the Heisman Trophy, so there’s some objective data that would say Young is awesome. Personally, however, I don’t think he’s as good as Tua Tagovailoa and, in my estimation, Mac Jones is even better than Tua.

Here, watch the highlights of Mac’s championship season at Alabama:

 

Say whatever you want, but that’s some damned fine football there. And when Mac got drafted by the Patriots, I struggled to resist my enthusiasm. Lots of first-round draft picks never really make it in the NFL, and few rookies start at quarterback. My expectation was that Jones would begin the season as backup to the veteran QB Cam Newton, and that only if Newton got injured — or if his performance was subpar, and the Patriots were losing — would Mac get a chance to show what he could do. So when it was announced that New England had cut Newton loose, I was astonished. By the way, I had every reason to dislike Newton, as he was the quarterback who led Auburn to their only National Championship. Being aware of this possible source of bias, however, I was determined to think well of him, so long as he was Mac’s teammate. Football is a team sport, and far be it from me to wish ill on the starting quarterback, just because I am partial toward the backup. Once the Pats cut Cam, however, I was free to go back to hating him, and his subsequent flop at Carolina was an excellent “I told ya so” opportunity.

Be classy — that’s the thing we should strive for as sports fans.  Mac Jones is a classy guy, and I think he took no joy in Cam Newton’s downfall, even though he profited from it. Everybody who watched the Patriots in preseason (e.g., Tom Curran) vouched that Jones won the starting job fair and square. He was simply a better quarterback than Newton, and keep in mind that Newton is a former MVP who once led the Panthers to the Super Bowl. Granted, injuries have since diminished Cam’s once astounding mobility, but for Jones to beat him out for the job in preseason was all the testimony anyone should need that Mac is a first-rate talent. Oh, but that’s not enough for Nick Wright, who has never missed an opportunity to badmouth Mac Jones.

Nick Saban has referred to the “rat poison” effect whereby players on a winning team start listening to the media sing their praises and get overconfident. Well, the cure for “rat poison” is to listen to your haters, and if I was Bill Belichik, I’d force Mac Jones to watch a highlight reel of Nick Wright disparaging him. Here he is Monday:

 

“You have one way to win: Get out to a lead, run the ball, let (Bill) Belichick work his voodoo on the other coaches and coast in,” Wright said on FS1. “But at the first sign at adversity, at the first sign of, ‘Hey, Mac. Can you complete a pass?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, I did that at Alabama a lot.’ It’s like, yeah, it’s a little different. You don’t have three first-round wide receivers running wide open. We need tight windows, we need good decisions, we need third-down conversions. Mac Jones is like, ‘Oh, boy. They didn’t tell me it was going to be like this at the trademark office.’ Instead, he’s 14-of-32, he has a 31 passer rating.
“Sometimes a guy’s numbers are awful and it’s like, oh, he played better than that. Mac’s numbers were awful and he played worse than that. It was a total disaster.”

Make Nick Wright shut his damned mouth — that should be the Patriots’ goal from here on out. Forget about everything else. Never mind who your opponent is, or what the down and distance may be. No, think of that son of bitch Nick Wright, and what he would say if you lose this game, and then play so hard that you shut his mouth.

By the way, I’ve looked at the standings and the schedule for the last two weeks of the regular season, and this scenario occurs: The Chiefs, now 11-4, lose their two final games, while the Patriots, now 9-6, win their two final games. That could conceivably result in a Chiefs-Patriots first-round playoff meeting, and if ever New England needed an incentive to play their hearts out, the opportunity to eliminate Kansas City — and ruin Nick Wright’s entire year — ought to be all the incentive necessary.

Oh, and lest I forget, just in case Nick Wright reads this: You’d better be praying to God that Patrick Mahomes stays healthy. There is a reason, after all, why old-fashioned dropback passers like Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers stay around the league longer than run-and-gun types like Mahomes. See, as long he’s in the pocket, a quarterback enjoys special protection under the rules. Once he starts running downfield, however, he’s just another runner, and that involves a greater risk of injury. Take away the amazing mobility — which is what happened to Cam Newton — and the run-and-gun QB can never again be what he once was.

A quarterback like Patrick Mahomes is racing the clock, really, hoping he can become a champion before he suffers the (statistically inevitable) injury as a result of his tendency to run for it whenever the pass protection collapses. It would be poor sportsmanship for me to hope that Mahomes gets hurt, but at the same time, I have a duty — as an objective observer of football — to warn Nick Wright that he’s putting all his eggs into a fragile basket. Maybe the KC QB will miraculously escape the statistical probabilities long enough to take the Chiefs to another Super Bowl, but Nick Wright ought to be a nervous wreck every time his boyfriend Mahomes takes off on one of his downfield escapades.

Karma is proverbially a bitch, and Nick Wright’s piled up enough bad karma that he’ll have no room to complain if the wheel turns and bad things happen to his precious Chiefs. Selah.




 

Category: Football

Comments

Comments are closed.