Recapping the 2025, 26 January, playoff games.

That's what we're doing today on Stealing Bananas.

I'm Ben Gretch.

You can find the Stealing Citadel's newsletter at BenGretsch.ch.substack.com with me as always is Sean Siegel.

You find all of his great work over at Rodeviz. Sean, we have not talked for a few weeks.

People will be excited for this to hit their air or their podcast feeds.

And we had the million things that we could have talked about.

We'll talk about a million things throughout the off season.

But just kind of checking back in now where we haven't talked in a few weeks,

one of the things we were thinking about leading here into the Super Bowl this weekend was to kind of talk through the games.

We always do the Sunday night shows

throughout the regular season, talk about everything we're seeing in the games during the

regular season. Fun to talk through the playoffs, but we haven't talked since literally the

divisional round. And so there's a ton of stuff. We were just spitballing some ideas before, a ton of stuff that we could talk about. You mentioned to me on the AFC side, how the weather was so bad. I was sharing some thoughts back with you about feeling like New England's three games have just been, I mean, like, in my opinion, not great football games.

I got a lot of stuff that people, you know, they love to tell you when you say something's not a great football game because it was low scoring. They love to tell you that, you don't, you just don't know defense. You don't know good defense in those things. I mean, the Patriots won 10-7 against Jared Stidham in a game with, you know, Blizzard in the second half, but even the first half was terrible.

The two teams didn't combine for 400 total yards.

I mean, they averaged less than 200 total yards on offense, which should be like a half.

But the first half was terrible.

The second half was somehow worse.

The Texans game prior to that, you had C.J. Stroud throwing all these picks. The Charters game prior to that, they had no tackles and looked completely lost offensively. They do all have good defenses, which Patriots fans were quick to tell me. But I was kind of pointing out that the Patriots run to the Super Bowl has been, I mean, it's, it's tough relative to they got all these allegations in the regular season that they

hadn't beat anyone and that there was the easiest regular season schedule and whatever,

one of the 10 easiest in NFL history based on whatever metrics.

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