Felger & Mazz: Fans Of Half The League Must Be Sick To Their Stomachs Seeing Garoppolo Succeed
BOSTON (CBS) -- Regular listeners of the Felger & Massarotti program know that Jim Murray has the tendency to find joy in places that others don't. For Big Jim, schadenfreude is very real.
And so, watching Jimmy Garoppolo tear apart the Dolphins defense for a half of a football game on Sunday got him thinking: Man, what must it be like to be a Dolphins fan, watching yet another Patriots quarterback look so good?
Felger & Mazz took the idea and ran with it.
"Murray is so right. If you're a Dolphins fan and you watch that, you are sick to your stomach," Felger said. "There are certain franchises -- I mentioned the Bears ..."
"The Bills! The Jets!" Mazz interjected. "The Dolphins! Start in the division for crying out loud."
"The Dolphins haven't had a quarterback since Marino retired in [1999]. They haven't had a quarterback in 20 years. The Bears, I mentioned the Bears because the Bears have not had a quarterback in my lifetime or my father's lifetime," Felger said.
"Or anybody's lifetime," chimed in Mazz.
"The Bears have never ever had a quarterback. Ever. Have the Lions ever had a quarterback?" Felger asked. "The Browns! [Bernie] Kosar in the '80s, a generation ago. You just, year after year after year after year after decade for some teams, you don't have a quarterback. Then you've got to watch the Patriots for a decade-and-a-half with Tom Brady just slice the league, then Brady gets suspended finally, and you're like, 'OK, now they can live like the rest of us. Now you're going to see what it's like for everybody else.' And then this kid comes on, and it's like, he's a top five quarterback in the league with the way he's played the first two weeks."
Mazz twisted the knife: "And they took him at the end of the second round."
"Oh, if you're a Dolphins fan, if you're a Bills fan, if you're a Jets fan, if you're a Bears fan, if you're a Lions fan, if you're a Browns fan, I mean how many teams do we have to mention? You are sick to your stomach," Felger said. "You're saying, 'How is it we've rifled through 20 coaches and we can't find another quarterback? How do they find the next guy after the next guy? How do they do that?'"
Realizing that we've seen all of six quarters of work out of Garoppolo, Felger cautioned, "I hope we're not getting ahead of ourselves. But he deserves a lot of credit for the way that he played. It was that good. Who knows if that's really what he is? We're going to have to see a much bigger sample. But man, that yesterday was something else."
The two also discussed how the whole future of Garoppolo and the Patriots seemed to change with that dominant showing on Sunday.
"If I'm Jimmy Garoppolo and I've got that ability and I'm playing like that, I ain't sticking around [to be a backup] any longer than I have to. I'm going to go play somewhere," Felger said. "And now we maybe know why Brady hates him."
"Because he's a threat," Mazz said.
"Yeah," Felger said, "maybe we know why Brady acted like such a baby at times over the summer. Because the kid can actually play."
