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I've been way behind on my Substack reading, so I haven't commented much lately, but I'm really going to miss this series! Maybe the best longform series I've read here.

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Damn it Aaron!

No saying things like that until it's actually over LOL. I'm trying really hard to stay in my zone, and not get sentimental about it myself, and you're not making it easy saying things like that!

In real life though, thank you so much for your compliments my friend. The sense of finality is running deep, both in the work and in my head. This Trent Green series is what put me on the map, and I never really thought of the day when it would eventually come to an end, but that end is coming, perhaps a bit sooner than I'm comfortable with.

In short, I'm going to miss writing this as much as you're going to miss reading it. I had never seen a nonfiction serial on this platform before I began this project, so I came into this with a totally blank slate. Nobody to copy. Nobody to even take inspiration from, and I feel like I've really created something worth my time and effort with this series. If it had a name attached to it that wasn't Trent Green, it would've garnered a lot more views and growth and such, but if it had any other name attached, then it wouldn't be what it is. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Most of my subscribers don't care to read these Trent Green installments. View counts and open rates and etc. are all way down whenever I put one out, but the real ones do read them, and those are the people I truly want to serve. That's why I put so much effort into this, and comments like this one make it all worth it.

Thank you very much buddy. Don't miss this series yet. It isn't gone yet, but the end is coming, and the appreciation means a lot.

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I think the 2000s AFC West is probably the most underrated division in general; while not discussed much throughout the series, the 00-02 Raiders and 04-09 Chargers were really good in edition to Trent's Chiefs and Jake's Broncos. I think a lot of it has to with not having a super bowl winner coming from that division, having really good teams miss the playoffs, and non of their QB's having a decade of winning. While Philip was really good for a while, He wasn't consistently winning the division as much as the other Big 4 in the AFC (55% career win % with the Chargers). Also these teams were afflicted with awful luck and often poor defense.

In terms of Jake and Trent's rivalry, the Chiefs would have made the 2002 playoffs and had the #1 seed in 2004 if Jake Plummer wasn't so good against them. If the Broncos had swept the Chiefs in 2004, they would have gotten a third matchup against the Chargers and avoided being obliterated by Peyton's Colts.

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You're absolutely right buddy. Nobody talks about the 2000s AFC West. A big reason for this is because it falls off big time starting in 2007, and remains weak (with a few exceptions but not many) pretty much to date, where it finally seems to be getting stronger again. I wish I could've talked about it more in the regular episodes, but there's only so much that can be included. I can talk about it here though.

In terms of combined win count, the AFC West was the strongest division in football in 2002 and 2005, and had multiple playoff teams in 2003 and 2004 and 2006 in the interim. I'm telling you, if Trent could've found his way into the AFC North to compete with Kordell Stewart, Tommy Maddox and Jon Kitna all the time, instead of Jake Plummer and Rich Gannon and Drew Brees all the time, you can bet he would've had more than one playoff appearance by now.

Players who play in great divisions get punished twice. Much like players who play at Coors Field in baseball. Your road splits are disproportionately bad, because you constantly have to adjust to playing in regular air, but then you get punished again because people think your home splits aren't real anyway. It's a double punishment. The same goes here. The lack of playoff appearances and playoff wins is punished in the court of public opinion, meanwhile at the same time somebody like Troy Aikman is rewarded for having lots of playoff appearances and playoff wins and etc, a lot of which came because the NFC East fell apart around him in the 1990s.

For people like Trent, this is a double punishment. He is both punished for his lack of stats due to the inequal talent spread, AND lesser players are rewarded for winning more due to the inequal talent spread. Troy Aikman is in the Hall of Fame, while Trent isn't, despite having just three top five seasons to Trent's four, and divisional quality has everything to do with it.

Another thing you've touched on correctly, is that it's a shame that American championship culture tends to cause everything that did not happen en route to the Super Bowl to be forgotten. I think you're correct that if even Jake Plummer or Peyton Manning had won a Super Bowl somewhere along the line, people would remember Trent's exploits against them a lot more, and remember him more fondly as a result.

For instance, Trent's otherworldly playoff game happened against Peyton Manning in a season that Peyton did not win the Super Bowl. If not for the game that shall not be named, Trent would've gone into the history books as the toughest challenge to the 2003 Super Bowl champions, and people would've remembered it. As it stands, nobody remembers it at all, because it wasn't on the SB champion's path.

If a tree falls in the really strong AFC West, and nobody hears it, did it really happen at all? Especially when there's a really big and strong tree called the Patriots repeatedly making noise in the extremely weak AFC East.

Way back in a time before time, before I went in deep on Trent, I was thinking about doing an article on the odd Peyton Manning, Jake Plummer, Trent Green divergence, and what it meant to the NFL's history. All three of these players kept taking bites out of each other, weakening one another, meanwhile Tom Brady never defeated Jake Plummer (0-3 in his career against him I believe), but he only had to face him in a playoff game once because Peyton kept taking care of him on Tom's behalf.

There's this mistaken notion out there in some circles that nobody ever got the measure over Tom Brady, but it's wrong. Jake Plummer did. Look at the results. The Broncos had the Patriots' number in the 2000s, but because of the hard work of primarily Trent Green and Peyton Manning, a wall was built keeping the Broncos away from the Patriots at all the important moments. This is why the Patriots won all the Super Bowl championships, because in 2001 the AFC was empty. Somebody had to win, and in 2003 and 2004 the Patriots had to defeat the Titans (who were running on fumes. You've read the article about it), Colts twice, and the Steelers in the AFC playoffs. No Chiefs. No Broncos. No Chargers, because they were all taking chunks out of each other.

When the Patriots finally did run into Jake in the 2005 playoffs, they were sent back to the Northeast with a 14 point loss. There was something in that particular matchup that did not favour the Patriots, and if not for both Peyton and Trent both working diligently to hold Jake Plummer down, the early 2000s could've looked a lot different in New England.

Imagine if history remembered Jake Plummer as the man who kept Tom Brady from all of the Super Bowls, much like Philip Rivers later became the kryptonite to Peyton Manning. I think he very well could've been remembered that way, if just a few breaks had broken different ways. His rivalry with Trent is a big reason that didn't happen, and this is what I meant when I said that these two men mutually handicapped each other in the legacy department.

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What you discussed is a big reason why I'm not a fan of divisions. Why should so much of team's season be based on geography. Is it right for the 10-6 Patriots to make the playoffs over the 10-6 Chiefs because one has the 13 win Broncos in their division and the other one doesn't?

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I don't think your problem is necessarily with divisions as a concept. It's with automatic divisional qualifiers, which I am not a fan of also. I don't think divisions are necessarily the worst thing in the world, but why is it written into law that every division must have a playoff team in it? This very thing has been ruining the first round of the NFL playoffs for years, and the 2005 New England Patriots are a perfect example.

Two time defending champions or not, this is a team that was blown out in the regular season by the Colts, by the Chargers, by the Chiefs, and by the Broncos (two garbage time touchdowns does not make this not a blowout). Every real team they played blew them out except Pittsburgh, making it clear as day that they were a waste of a playoff spot, and in the playoffs the inevitable occurred. They were blown out by the Broncos again.

You can't tell me that the Chiefs (who embarrassed the Patriots when the two teams played) wouldn't have been a better use of that playoff spot than the Patriots.

It's actually a fun hypothetical to remove the divisional automatic qualifiers from the 2005 AFC. This puts the Chiefs to the six, and allows the Patriots to fall out altogether, in addition to some seeding changes. First round becomes these Chiefs vs a Jaguars team that was falling apart. I have no doubt that even the Cleveland Browns could've beaten the Jaguars that day, and it gives us Steelers vs Broncos one week early and Chiefs vs Colts in round two. No 14 point blowouts in round two anywhere to be seen, like we got by allowing NE in.

There are more cases than this to be made against divisional auto-qualifiers, but rest assured that I like it even less than you do.

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