NEW YORK (AP) —regular season Youth Ito Smith Jersey , Tom Brady and the New England Patriots have that familiar look that the rest of the NFL has grown accustomed to over the years.Championship contender.The Patriots remained No. 1 in the AP Pro32 poll on Tuesday , receiving 10 of 12 first-place votes for 381 points in balloting by media members who regularly cover the NFL.New England (12-3) needs just a win or a Pittsburgh loss to claim home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs again.“The road to the Super Bowl will undoubtedly go through Foxborough — again — now that the Patriots are one win away from clinching home-field advantage — again — in the AFC playoffs,” Newsday’s Bob Glauber said.“Rob Gronkowski makes the Bills pay — again — for not drafting the hometown star tight end, as the Pats dominate Buffalo.“All they need now to clinch the No. 1 seed is a season-ending win over the Jets — a layup if there ever was one.”The Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings, who received one first-place vote, are tied for No. 2.“Don’t think Ben Roethlisberger and company wouldn’t relish a rematch against the Patriots, even if it’s in Foxborough with a Super Bowl berth on the line,” Ira Kaufman of SB Nation Radio said of the Steelers.Despite having the NFL’s best record at 13-2 and home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs, the Philadelphia Eagles, who received the other first-place vote, couldn’t make up any ground and remained No. 4. The Eagles got past the Oakland Raiders 19-10 on Christmas night in a sluggish game.“Doug Pederson probably has won Coach of the Year, managing to keep winning without Carson Wentz,” said Charean Williams of Pro Football Talk.“But the Eagles didn’t look like Super Bowl contenders against the Raiders.”Another NFC division champion, the Los Angeles Rams, maintained its spot in the poll at No. 5.“Keep hitting high notes,” Fox Sports John Czarnecki said of the NFC West champions.The New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers, tied for first place in the NFC South, followed at No. 6 and No. 7 respectively.“It has to please Sean Payton how well the defense is finishing the season,” John Clayton of 710-ESPN Seattle said about the Saints coach. “What a turnaround.”The Jacksonville Jaguars Stitched Deadrin Senat Jersey , set to host a playoff game for the first time since the 1999 season, remained at No. 8.“Does anyone outside of Jags HQ trust Blake Bortles in the playoffs?” asked Alex Marvez of The Sporting News.The Kansas City Chiefs (No. 9) and Atlanta Falcons flipped places from last week to round out the top 10. Welcome to Manager of the Year Day! Oh, what a day this is, every year. I know you’re probably getting ready for your Manager of the Year watch party, and you’re making a chips-and-dip platter in the shape of Bruce Bochy’s head. Expecting a lot of people, are you? Ha ha, just a little manager humor, folks, but, yes, the whole sports world is talking about the Manager of the Year Award!Which is to say, nobody is talking about the Manager of the Year Award. Take a list of preseason projections, match them up with the postseason teams, look for an outlier, and skip the voting. Save everybody some time. It’s the dumbest award. Matt Williams won it in 2014, a couple weeks after a poor decision ruined the Nationals’ postseason hopes, and a year before his final managerial season ever. Paul Molitor won it last year, and the Twins have already let him go. Once, I wrote a big Youth Deadrin Senat Jersey , long article about a better way to determine the Manager of the Year Award, and it was so dumb that Google stopped indexing it, and now I can’t find it. It’s better this way. There is no fixing this award, so I would like to complain about it for awhile, just to get a few things off my chest. Here is the exact problem with the Manager of the Year Award, in two headers. 1. National writers have no business pretending like they know who deserves the awardUnlike MVP, Cy Young, or Rookie of the Year, the Manager of the Year should be awarded in great part because of what happens off the field. That is, the Manager of the Year should improve the morale of a team and have the ability to navigate a testosterone-filled minefield of exhausted millionaires, all of whom have spent their whole life not struggling at baseball before struggling for the first time. It’s one thing to chuckle and gurgle something out about baseball being a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s another to make decisions in a way that keeps the attention and faith of a disparate group of 25 different players (along with a taxi squad of scared, overwhelmed rookies who will float through for the first, and sometimes only, time of their major league career.)Great managers can do this. Average managers can look at a cheat sheet and determine which reliever to bring into a tight situation. Above-average managers can filter all of the data coming in from their coaches and players to figure out correctly which relievers should be available and which position players need a day off. Great managers are doing all of the above, but tying it all together with a rare brand of forward-thinking leadership that commands attention and respect. Like hell do I know if Craig Counsell does all of that better than Brian Snitker. But there are national writers who are far more connected, far more attuned to the scuttlebutt, who work tirelessly to take the pulse of all 15 teams in a given league. They at least have a hint about which teams are up Stitched Isaiah Oliver Jersey , which teams are down, and which teams are overachieving because of the person in charge. Is this a list of those writers, though? No idea. But probably not. Not all of them, at least. A healthy chunk will look at preseason expectations vs. season record and go back to the job that pays them. And it’s a revolving group of writers who votes on the award, so even if you’re somehow lucky enough to get a group of writers who are entirely committed to the Manager of the Year one year, you might not get the same group the next year. It’s too much to cover. Even if there were a specific managers beat, where a writer spent all of his or her day, every day, detailing only the ins and outs of different managerial decisions and rumors, it would be a tough gig to wrangle. But that job description doesn’t exist, so it becomes an impossible task for the typical beat writer, even if they take it as seriously as possible. 2. Local beat writers have no business pretending like they know who deserves the awardThey’re too close, you see. It’s like when Baseball America releases their top-100 prospects list, and fans of different teams complain about the specific rankings of their organization’s prospects. They can’t comprehend the existence of 29 other farm systems because they’ve spent all of their effort focusing on one farm system. Which is normal. But it’s why fan-based top-100 lists aren’t a thing. Ranking the 50 best MLB free agents for the 2018-2019 offseasonThe Yankees are pretending they won’t make big free agency moves and it’s hilarious3 possible motivations behind the Nationals’ 10-year, $300 million offer to Bryce HarperYes, bad teams should sign Bryce Harper and Manny MachadoBeat writers who spend nearly 200 days with managers (spring training, included) are likely to have a fantastic handle about what is going on. They’ll know if a manager should have lost a clubhouse, but hasn’t, and they’ll know when the opposite is true. They’ll have a great idea of how a manager has set his team up for success Youth Isaiah Oliver Jersey , and they’ll be among the dozen or so most qualified people in the world to make that determination. Great. Now do it for the other 14 teams. It’s an unreasonable request, of course, because there just isn’t that much time. But if we’re accepting that beat writers have a wealth of information about the qualifications of the manager they cover, we also have to accept they have a dearth of information about the other managers. They might hear things about managers in their own division, sure, and they’ll likely compare notes with fellow scribes. But to make a qualified determination about Manager X being better than Manager Y? They have far too much information in one column, and there’s no way they can make it up for the other column. The answer is probably something like this: Whittle down the candidates to the top three or five. Have the representative writers from each team get together and state their case. Debate. Discuss. Draw from the statistical and anecdotal, and if you believe that the manager you covered deserves the award, try to convince the other writer. Then, and maybe only then, would we get an award that better matches reality. After all that work, there would still be nobody who cared about the Manager of the Year Award. So the current system is probably the best system. There’s never going to be a great one. Task some writers who take the job seriously, and hope they get it right. Accept that they’re doing an awful lot of guesswork and speculation, and move on to the real awards. Welcome to Manager of the Year Day! It’s not that bad, really. I feel better. It’s not that bad once you get a few things off your chest, and I look forward to congratulating the managers who weren’t expect to do a bunch before this season started, only to have some success.