A fine mess

And now it's time for the Donning of the Tinfoil Hat ceremony, in which the Blob salutes Our Only Available President, fearless leader of the Conspiracy Kook Society (Devin Nunes, Sergeant-At-Arms), and indulges his own paranoia-fueled conspiracy kook-ism.

Which is to say: Finally the New England Patriots have gotten their revenge for Deflategate.

Well played, Josh McDaniels. Well played. Clearly you have absorbed the lessons of the master, grasshopper.

The master, of course, being Bill Belichick, to whom the Blob assigns blame for most of the evil in the world. That would include McDaniels, exposed as an immature punk in Denver and perhaps little changed, pulling out of a deal to be the new head coach of the Indianapolis Colts after stringing them along for three weeks.

(And, yeah, maybe that wasn't his intent. Maybe he made his decision and then, honestly confused, changed his mind. It happens. But if he had misgivings, don't you think he owed the Colts a heads-up he was having misgivings?)

Anyway ... screwing over the Colts is such a Patriots kind of move it's hard not to see Belichick's fingerprints all over it, at least when you're in tinfoil-hat mode. It's such an appealing conspiracy theory, after all, believing that rat you-know-whatting the Colts is revenge for Deflategate. Unfortunately ...

Unfortunately, when you take off the tinfoil hat, you realize that's not what's going on here.

No, what's going on here is McDaniels proving he's pretty much the same guy he was in Denver, where his brief tenure was an unqualified disaster. A lot has been written and said since about how much he's grown since that experience, and some people bought into it. As a cynical former sportswriter who's heard these phony redemption stories a million times before, the Blob cynically never believed a word of it.

There's a part of me that hates that cynical old sportswriter. But damned if his instincts don't turn out to be on point a lot.

Here's the thing about this, see: Not only has McDaniels left the Colts in a serious lurch, he's screwed the assistant coaches he'd already convinced to leave their jobs and move to Indy. What do they do now? What do they tell their families? And which of them becomes the first to hop a plane to Boston to pound lumps on McDaniels' ass?

Screwing those guys over sure looks from here like the act of someone who clearly hasn't a learned a thing since the Denver debacle, all that fluff about how much he's grown notwithstanding. And if that's the case, thank God he did pull out of the deal. The Colts certainly can do better, even if the pickings look pretty scarce at this late date.

Whether McDaniels was the right man for the job was always a little sketchy, anyway, given both his track record and the fact he was the offensive coordinator for a franchise that didn't need one. How brilliant do you have to be, after all, when you have the greatest quarterback of all time? How much scheming do you have to do other than to say "OK, Tom, go win the game now"?

Good God, even Charlie Weis looked like a genius when he was coaching Tom Brady. And we all know how that worked out for Mr. Schematic Advantage.

So ... yeah. Maybe the Colts ducked a haymaker here. Maybe they should send a decorative fruit basket to Robert Kraft for whatever Kraft did to convince McDaniels to stick around (More money? The big chair when Belichick hangs it up?).  Maybe this is all for the best.

Still doesn't mean the little goof didn't screw them over royally. Still doesn't mean he didn't leave them in one hell of a pickle.

And why do I keep thinking Belichick is having a good laugh about that?

Darn tinfoil hat, anyway.