I'll be the first to admit that I was not willing to jump on the Matt Cassel bandwagon for the longest time. Something about putting the team's fate in the hands of an unproven, untested, un-everything-else backup that hasn't started a game since high school and has looked atrocious in every NFL minute he'd ever logged prior to this season just didn't sit well with me.

That was, of course, until he decided to put together his second-straight 400-yard, 3-touchdown passing game. He also tossed in 14 yards and a TD on the ground just for good measure.

Consider me a born-again Matt Cassel fan. I wouldn't go so far as to anoint him the savior of the team, and I definitely don't think the Pats should franchise him next year or offer him a multi-year deal at anything more than $5 million annually, but this whole shebang from the Brady injury to Cassel's taking over could have played out a lot worse. Had we known Brady would miss the entire season (aside from the 11 attempts he had in Week 1 against the Chiefs), most of us would have been ecstatic with a 7-4 record heading into Week 13.

Anyway, on the same day that Cassel decided to join an elite group that was previously comprised of only four quarterbacks (Dan Fouts, Dan Marino, Phil Simms and the immortal Billy Volek... seriously, how did Volek find his way onto this list? Two Hall of Famers and a two-time Pro Bowler, and Billy freaking Volek. Wonder which end of the spectrum Cassel will end up on when all is said and done?...), Randy Moss also decided to have his best game of the season. Big play after big play, Moss finished with 125 yards and 3 TDs on 8 receptions. Just awesome. Moss' outburst makes it easy to overlook the fact that the Pats have nothing resembling a legitimately threatening run game at the moment.

If there was any downside (not counting the continued atrocious play of the secondary), it was the ejection of Matt Light after he got into it with Channing Crowder. I'm not one of those hardcore rules-sticklers that thinks there should never be dust-ups during the heat of battle (when you have a bunch of 300-pounders whose job it is to toss people around and they're knocking heads all game, fists are bound to start flying), but getting ejected in a pivotal conference game with implications on your playoff hopes is simply inexcusable. Watching Light rain down hammer-fisted blows on the back of Crowder's dread-locked dome was obviously somewhat entertaining, but in that situation, you should be fighting to keep yourself in the game, not fighting and getting yourself kicked out of it.