The blogs are listed by Boston neighborhood - or city or town if outside of Boston - alphabetically, by topic and by T stop. Check it out.

Like the Patriots in 2006, the victorious Jets get the pleasure of taking on the Indianapolis Colts on the road. The Colts advanced by snoozing the life out of the offensively punchless Baltimore Ravens. Some pigskin pundits were so excited by the Baltimore’s wild card victory at New England that they imagined the Ravens flying all the way to the Super Bowl, but Ravens defense was unable to produce game changing turnovers and the offense couldn’t couldn’t spring any big play runs the way they did on the first drive of the game against the Patriots. Safety Ed Reed briefly held a game-changer in his hands after picking off a deep out from Peyton Manning intended for wide receiver Pierre Garcon. Reed returned the ball deep into Colts territory but was caught from behind by Garcon who forced a fumbled that was recovered by tight end Dallas Clark. And that was it for the Ravens.

The Minnesota Vikings continued their path to destiny - which is to say a loss in New Orleans, I predict - by hammering the Dallas Cowboys 34-3. Brett Favre is unshocking the world by setting up the Vikings for a heart breaking and inexplicable loss in the NFC Championship game.

That game will be the first of the kind in the Superdome. The New Orleans Saints are improbably close to doing the traditionally impossible: Advancing to the Super Bowl. Saints extended their Year of Offensive Dominance by crushing the Arizona Cardinals 45-14.

Colts v. Saints will make for a Super Shootout Bowl.

The 33-14 blow out didn’t expose any previously unknown flaws in the Patriots roster or scheme, it was more of a summary of the many woes that kept the team from getting much of anything going this season.

In sharp contrast to 2001, 2003 and 2007, the 2009 player acquisitions failed to give the team a boost. Consequently, the Patriots’ slow but visible decline continued on both sides of the ball. The play calling on offense frequently seemed unimaginative and even erratic, quite often robbing the Patriots of momentum. Defense was more or less the same as it has been for the last couple of years, but with ever less offensive production to hide behind. Opposing teams went after New England’s defense with downfield passing and generally had great success doing so.

The most memorable play of the season is no doubt head coach Bill Belichick’s decision to go for first down on fourth and two with the ball at his team 28-yard line late in the game against the Indianapolis Colts. If the Patriots had managed to get the two yards they would have won, but a short pass right was briefly bobbled by runningback Kevin Faulk and by the time he had secured the ball he had been push behind the first down marker. The Colts went on to win the game.

In the week leading up to the game against Carolina Panthers late in the season Belichick sent four players home from practice after they arrived late for a film session. One of the players, wide receiver Randy Moss, seemed to respond by completely tanking it against the Panthers. Whatever the case, Belichick regained control of the team and steered it to its first AFC Division East Championship since 2007. That was as good as things got. In the final game of the regular season wide receiver Wes Welker sustained a major knee-injury that ended his season and probably doomed New England’s. Without his sure-handed Wizard of the Underneath Brady was left with a receiver corps that on balance was weaker than the mostly sorry lot he had to work with in 2006.

However, one shouldn’t be overly pessimistic regarding the team’s prospects in the 2010 season. Two new upper echelon receivers should prove quite enough to substantially improve the offense even before Welker’s return. That alone would likely improve all other areas of the team just by creating more yards, more first downs and more points. The Patriots haven’t had a quality third wide receiver since Donte Stallworth departed after the 2007 season and it has shown. Stallworth had the speed, strength and balance to present a true homerun threat when lined up alongside Moss and Welker. Without a quality third wide receiver the offense has been unable to counter defenses’ measures to minimize the damage wrought by Moss and Welker. It has also meant that the Patriots have a thin corps. Julian Edelman, who played quarterback for Kent State in college, has absolutely no business playing second wide receiver and quite frankly probably isn’t all that good even as fourth. The same is equally true for Sam Aiken, who earned his living as a special teams contributor before injuries and failed attempts to upgrade the wide receiver position suddenly put him in the top four.

Likewise, adding two defensive players, preferably linebackers, with notable pass rushing skills and the secondary will likely look quite a bit better than it did in 2009. The current lack of pass rush has made it extremely difficult for the secondary to contain even average passing attacks. A stronger pass rush could change that and in the process give defensive players a chance to prove themselves as playmakers, something they were painfully unable to do this past season.

Yes, a few more points and a bit more pressure could - should - be enough to restore the Patriots to the elite level of NFL, to the 12-13 wins range and to competing for first round byes rather than play off berths.

Some wail and lament that the loss to the Ravens was the end of the dynasty. As I wrote here at the time, I think the 2006 regular-season loss to the Miami Dolphins was the end of the dynasty, but it really doesn’t matter when the dynasty died or if it is dead. What matters is success in 2010, what matters is winning the next Lombardi Trophy.

The Sports Hub broadcasts New England Patriots’ games which presumably is why the green vehicle is flying the name and cool-dude logo of the best franchise in the NFL.

Not only were only 11,000 jobs lost last month, the figure for October was revised upwards. Initial unemployment claims are showing similar if not quite as dramatic improvement.

I think there are two reasons for the increasingly more rapid recovery in the job market. One is that companies were overly aggressive with layoffs last fall and winter. That’s not an observation made in hindsight, but a point that was made to me by several mid-level managers 9-12 months ago. The over-sized staff reductions made unemployment numbers even worse than what most economists predicted, but also allowed companies to return to or increase profitability evens as revenue declined.

Even so, the improved outlook for the labor market was no sure thing even a month ago when the unemployment rate topped 10% and initial unemployment claims seemed to be stuck above half a million a week.

While President Barack Obama’s administration has done many foolish things that I think will hurt the economy for years to come it did not monkey-wrench the jobs recovery by trying to slow layoffs through legislation or regulation. Companies were free, as they should be, to axe as many workers they felt necessary and because of that I think we’ll see faster employment growth next year than most expect today. In fact, the socially most helpful and economically least harmful thing the Administration and Congress have done this year is repeatedly extending unemployment insurance benefits for laid off workers. Those extensions will have to come to an end next year, probably in the second half of the year, even if it means cutting off workers who have been out of a job for two years or more. But extending the benefits was absolutely the right thing to do this year of relentless job cutting.

The trick in 2010 and 2011 will be to steer the economy towards growth that is based more on productivity gains and less on deficit spending, debt accumulation and a weak dollar. The latter three are stimulants that the US economy has relied on for several years now and they do not make for lasting economic growth. Gradually increased interest rates and smaller budget deficits might help prevent a bubble reflation. While 2009 is heading towards a happy ending, it was a lousy ride that I don’t think too many people will want to go through again.

Life can get boring if one demands a plethora of data points on which to base trend spotting so let’s just assume that the overnight ratings success of WBZ-FM 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston heralds a wide spread migration from AM to FM by talk-driven radio. After all, one of the reasons that compelled WRKO’s lone star Howie Carr to unsuccessfully attempt to switch to WTKK was the opportunity to hold forth on the FM band, where his voice can reach an audience beyond Coolidge Corner after the sun sets. Clearly, FM is the future for AM.

So let’s say that most of talk radio moves to FM - where it would replace music stations getting squeezed by handheld music players like iPhones - what then would fill the AM band? AM became home to talk after music moved to FM so it seems that one can see AM as a minor league for emerging formats.

In Boston’s case specifically one could the Spanish-language music and variety programming replace Anglo sports and political talk. Latino stations have yet to make inroads on FM in the Boston area and don’t have much of a foothold on AM, either (reasons for the weakness of Hispanic radio probably include a fair degree of geographic dispersion of Hispanics in the area and the diversity of the Hispanic audience, which spans from African-Caribbean Dominicans to indigenous people from Central America. It’s not exactly like Texas where one can get a couple of ratings points just from spinning Tejano or re-broadcasting Mexican soccer games). For Latino radio it would probably be quite a bit of progress to snatch a signal like AM-850 (where sports behemoth WEEI currently resides) or AM-680 (WRKO).

But what else might emerge, besides various foreign-language formats? Perhaps geographic or topical niche stations, like North Shore talk or homebuilders/homeowners talk. Perhaps programming aimed at tweeners and their poor parents’ wallets (although it’s not ragingly obvious to me how a commuter-based industry like radio can do all that well with kids whose commuting consist of riding a bus to school or a mini-van to soccer practice). Perhaps an enterprising evangelical church would snap up a strong-signaled AM station to serve souls 24/7 in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean.

For a major university with billions of dollars in endowment funds it might seem like a good idea to take the school’s message to the airwaves, maybe in order to build syndicated programming that could become an additional revenue stream in the not so distant future.

Personally, I’d welcome a jazz station. I don’t care that it’s AM. Heck, AM makes it sound like you’re listening to old 78 RPM records and that’s cool.

But here’s the kicker: The so-called relevant population, roughly speaking the school-aged population, was 82,000 and change in 2000 and 2008 alike. In other words, Boston’s adult population grew by almost 7% while the size of the school-aged population was unchanged. That seems a little bit odd, doesn’t it?

To learn more about the student poverty rate read the post on the 2007 data.