The two threads should have been merged since they were on the same subject. I considered doing that but since both threads had plenty of responses by the time I noticed there were two of them, the one new combined thread would have lacked continuity; therefore I did not merge them.
That still left the problem with two threads on the same topic on the first page of the main forum. This was an NFL topic and hence really deserved to be in the NFL forum from the start, but had evolved primarily to comparisons to what if the Patriots had done something similar. I decided to move the thread that was further down on the page with fewer responses to the NFL Forum with hopes that conversation on that thread would focus on the subject from an NFL-wide perspective, while the other one would likely continue from a Patriots-centric point of view.