The New England Patriots Make Me Want To Punch Babies
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by Wade Garrett
I know that people have said all of this before. Whatever. The sports media's obsession with the New England Patriots is seriously effecting the amount of entertainment I get from watching the game of football.
Allow me to introduce this post with four real quotations from ESPN's recent Monday Night Football broadcast of the game between the New England Patriots and the Cincinnati Bengals:
"What is it about putting on the New England Patriots' uniform that makes ordinary players perform at extraordinary levels?" - Tony Kornheiser
"Tom's Brady's good, that's all there is to it!" - Ron Jaworski "And he's pretty good-looking as well!" - Tony Kornheiser
"Its not that the Bengals are doing anything wrong, its just that the guys on the other side of the ball are good!" - Ron Jaworski
When is the media going to stop shoving the New England Patriots down our throats? Surely I can't be the only person who is sick and tired of it.
The Patriots are 4-0 this season. Yes, they have looked sharp in their first four wins of the season, but teams start 4-0 almost every season. There are several 4-0 teams in the NFL as we speak, and yet ESPN's pundits were all but handing the New England Patriots a 19-0 season from the first week of the season. Some context: in recent seasons, the Chicago Bears, the Indianapolis Colts (twice, in '04 and '05) and the Denver Broncos have gone undefeated deep into the season, but never received similar favorable treatment from the media. For those three teams, the prospect of an undefeated season was raised only for the purposes of discussing why an undefeated season was unlikely to happen in the modern NFL, but when the Patriots start the season with consecutive impressive victories, football experts talk undefeated season.
The Patriots have defeated the 1-3 New York Jets, whose only win was over 0-4 Miami. The Patriots cheated in their game against the Jets, using cameras to record the Jets' sideline conversations and play calls. They've also defeated the 1-3 Buffalo Bills, whose only win was over the Jets, and who were missing three members of their starting secondary and two of their starting linebackers. Read that again - out of their top seven pass defenders, five of them did not play because of injuries. The Patriots have also defeated the 1-3 San Diego Chargers, who are a complete mess after losing two key members of their offensive line and undergoing the arrogant, misguided firing of head coach Marty Schottenheimer. And they defeated the 1-3 Cincinnati Bengals, who are missing their top two running backs (including all-pro Rudi Johnson) and four of their linebackers. In short, the Patriots' opponents are 4-12 on the season, and three of their four wins were over seriously injury-depleted teams. The Patriots have looked just about as impressive as a football team can look, but the teams they have been facing have been little more than practice squads.
For ten years or so, football fans have complained that John Madden - the most famous announcer in football - appears to openly cheer for Brett Favre, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. Isn't that annoying? Now take it and multiply it by every announcer in the NFL, and by the number of players on a team, and that's how the media treats the New England Patriots. Not only is their play incessantly praised, but their personalities and lifestyle choices are the subject of endless adoration. GQ recently ran a ridiculous photograph of Tom Brady wearing a suit jacket over a grey hooded sweatshirt.</a> Surely, this would subject him to ridicule, right? Wrong. When the subject came up, an ESPN broadcaster said "hey, its unusual, but that's just Tom, he's a high-fashion guy and that's a high-fashion look that a lot of hip guys are wearing these days." Um, really? A high-fashion look? That a lot of hip guys are wearing? Where are these hip guys of whom you speak? Maybe I should check with my high-fashion colleague, but . . . I'm pretty sure that look is ridiculous. Actually, now I'm totally certain. As if that wasn't bad enough, the broadcasters mentioned his good looks on several different occasions. many football players, including, coincidentally, Cincinnati Bengals quarterback are good-looking, but Brady is the only player over whom every Armani-suited broadcaster seems to have a man-crush.
Finally, there is the entire question of the Patriots' cheating. During the first quarter of their Week 1 game against the New York Jets, the Patriots were caught using an illegal camera to spy on the New York sideline. Their defensive captain, Rodney Harrison, has been suspended by the league for 4 games for failing a test for Human Growth Hormone, a type of anabolic steroid. (Of course, he will continue to reap the benefits of the illegal steroids long after his suspension terminates at midnight tonight.) One of their star linebackers, Junior Seau, 'retired' from football, thus voiding his contract with the San Diego Chargers, at which point he immediately signed with the New England Patriots at a much lower salary. The unbelievably talented Randy Moss had malingered, exaggerated injuries, and played lazily for years, to the point where his former team, the Oakland Raiders, gave him away for cents on the dollar, trading him to the Patriots in return for a 4th-round draft pick. However, since the Pats could not afford Moss' salary, Moss sold out the NFL players union by agreeing to take a $6,000,000 pay cut so that the Patriots could stay under the salary cap. This is the same guy who, just months earlier, had claimed that he was underpaid. The legality of Moss' haircut was questionable, but the league eventually approved it.
At best, the Patriots violate a significant number of the league's unspoken "man-laws." At worst, they are cheaters. When the NFL penalized the Patriots a 1st-round draft pick for illegally filming the Jets' sidelines, the general consensus amongst football writers and broadcasters was that the NFL had overrated to a one-time infraction, totally ignoring that and specifically reminded every NFL team over the last off-season that such conduct was against the league's rules.
Did I mention that the Patriots' dynasty began because referees blew a call in the 2002 AFC Championship game so badly that the NFL apologized and changed the rule book so that it would never happen again?
Does anybody remember Super Bowl XXV, when Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, then the defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, instructed his players to engage in a systematic pattern of creating dog-piles, lying on top of Buffalo ballcarriers once they have been tackled, and kicking the ball once the referee had marked it, in order to slow down Buffalo's no-huddle offense, because the NFL didn't have the balls to enforce the rules and penalize the Giants 15 yards for doing so?
Most suspicious of all was the sudden way in which the NFL cut short its investigation of the Patriots' cheating. When the NFL caught the Patriots spying in week 1, it asked the Patriots to turn over every copy of every such videotape they have ever recorded, for inspection by league officials. Two days after the box of Patriots' tapes arrived at NFL headquarters, and destroyed all of the tapes. If there was truly nothing incriminating on those tapes, then why did they need to be destroyed? Why couldn't some third-party sportswriters have been allowed to watch them, to verify the league's story? If the Patriots' turned over all of their copies, having presumably already milked them for all that they were worth, why did they need to be destroyed at all?
Could the NFL have found evidence of cheating so serious that its publication would cast doubt on the credibility of the league? Could have found evidence of cheating in one of New England's three Super Bowls? Could it have found evidence that the New England Patriots' defensive linemen, as widely expected, hid microphones in their shoulder pads to capture the opposing team's audibles? Is the NFL protecting its credibility by protecting the Patriots? If NBA Commissioner David Stern had destroyed all evidence of the 1984 draft lottery, or Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had destroyed all evidence of Barry Bonds' drug tests, sportswriters and fans would have never let them hear the end of it. And yet, everybody is not only willing, but downright eager to let New England off the hook. Why? Why them? Which almighty power decided that the New England Patriots were unique and delicate snowflakes, whose accomplishments are in need of perpetual laud?
I don't know how much more of this I can take. Please, deliver us from the New England Patriots and the sportscasters who jerk them off with one hand while tickling their balls with the other. There's not much more of this I can take.
Wade Garrett lives in New York City. His blog is called Common Sense Dancing.
