Patriots

Morning sports update: Bart Scott thinks Patriots fans will ‘run Bill Belichick out of town’ without quarterback fix

"If Bill Belichick doesn't get this fixed in short order, he's going to become the villain."

Bill Belichick and the Patriots missed the playoffs for the first time since 2008. Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff

By Hayden Bird

The Celtics lost to the Jazz 122-108 on Tuesday. Jaylen Brown led Boston with 33 points, but had some strong words for his teammates after the game.

Brown and the Celtics will get a chance for redemption on Thursday (7:30 p.m.) back at TD Garden against the Raptors.

The Bruins are back in action tonight, facing the Rangers at 7 p.m.

Bill Belichick and the pressure of a post-Brady world: For multiple decades, Bill Belichick’s Patriots dominated the AFC East.

In 2020, that changed with the landmark decision by Tom Brady to leave in free agency and sign with the Buccaneers. And as the 43-year-old quarterback led Tampa to a Super Bowl win, Belichick and the Patriots fell to a 7-9 record (and the first non-playoff season since 2008).

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Of course, Belichick is still far from the hot seat. But as ESPN analyst (and former linebacker) Bart Scott recently explained, things are shifting quickly in the AFC East. If Belichick isn’t careful,  Scott believes New England fans might run out of patience.

“In the last 20 years, we have never been able to say that the Patriots have the worst quarterback in the division,” said Scott in a segment on Tuesday. “We understand that it’s a lot of young guns. You think about Tua [Tagovailoa], if he’s going to be able to reach his potential, we know right now that Josh Allen is at the peak, and if [the Jets] bring Deshaun Watson to that division, could you imagine the Patriots finally feeling what the rest of the division had to feel like having to know that they had to go against Tom Brady?

“You talk about Boston fans being irate, they’ll be trying to run Bill Belichick out of town,” Scott claimed. “You either die the hero or live around and stay around long enough to see yourself become the villain. And right now, if Bill Belichick doesn’t get this fixed in short order, he’s going to become the villain, become the target.”

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Show host Jay Williams compared the post-Brady effect in New England to Cleveland after LeBron James left as a free agent.

“When LeBron left Cleveland, they never made it back to the playoffs,” said Williams. “I feel like the Patriots could be becoming what the Cleveland Cavs are post-LeBron.”

Trivia: When the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens, they did not take Bill Belichick with them (he was let go by the then-unnamed Baltimore franchise in February, 1996). Who eventually became the Ravens’ first head coach?

(Answer at the bottom).

Hint: He was also the head coach of the first NFL team Belichick worked for in 1975.

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Red Sox pitchers and catchers report in one week:

After a third straight loss, Kyrie Irving gave some blunt commentary on the Nets: “I don’t think we go out every single day of our lives and sacrifice the time in order to be average at anything,” Irving explained. “We look very average. And we have the talent that the eye test presents that we should be dominating.”

On this day: In 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a reigning chess world champion, Garry Kasparov.

It was the first of two famous matches between the Russian grandmaster and the cutting edge computer. Though some in the chess community maintained that it would be decades before a computer could defeat the world’s best human players, Deep Blue achieved the feat in its first opportunity.

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Kasparov responded like a champion, rallying to win the match over the next five games.

But in 1997, Deep Blue struck back. Despite dropping the first game of the rematch, the computer ultimately prevailed in a strange finale in which Kasparov made some uncharacteristic moves.

He discussed the final 1997 game in a 2018 interview with The New Yorker, saying that it was his intent to flummox the computer with unprecedented moves. Yet in the end, the strategy backfired.

“That was my hope that since I’d never played [those moves] before, and it was not part of my opening repertoire, that computer would not be ready,” Kasparov explained. “I played this position, very risky.”

“To be precise,” Kasparov admitted, bluntly, “[it] was a bad move.”

Daily highlight: Stephen Curry made an absolutely ridiculous shot in the Warriors’ win over the Spurs on Tuesday.

Trivia answer: Ted Marchibroda

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