The New England Patriots Are Evil And Must Be Stopped!
There’s a common saying in New Zealand that we support our own team plus whoever happens to be playing Australia. Across in the English Premier League there’s a long held sentiment that it doesn’t matter who wins the title as long as it isn’t Manchester United. Or Arsenal or Liverpool or Manchester City or Chelsea. Or Spurs, but only if you’re an Arsenal fan (nobody else really believes it’s possible anyway).
In America there is a certain kind of person, a despicable one if we’re putting labels on it, who ‘just happens’ to support the Los Angeles Lakers, the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys. Oh what a coincidence, the three most storied franchises in each of the three biggest sports? Except that the Lakers and Yankees are fairly trash these days and the Cowboys may be coming good again but they haven’t made the Super Bowl in over two decades now.
That ain’t true of the New England Patriots. They’re off for their record ninth appearance in the big show having pushed aside the Pittsburgh Steelers the other day and we’re all now in for a pretty testing two weeks until that game kicks off. Not the damn Patriots. Please God, no, not them again.
Before I go any further, you’re welcome to stop reading now and label this a jealous act of hatesmanship because you’d be 100% correct on that front. As a Cowboys fan myself (but not a Lakers or Yankees fan, I’ll have you know), I could hardly be more jealous of the Patriots. A stable team that’s regularly competitive? Constantly winning playoff games? Here I am supporting a team that I’m told is America’s team and they go from 12 wins one season to 4 wins the next. The Patriots have an owner in Robert Kraft who isn’t completely above board (no owner in the NFL is – the Jets owner is being talked up for a foreign ambassador role in Donald Trump’s White House) but compared to Jerry Jones that’s nothing. I don’t believe I need to go any further into ol’ Jerry’s shenanigans, either.
Long story short, the Patriots have been too good for too long and it’s somebody else’s turn now. Presumably the Atlanta Falcons, since… they’re the only other team left.
Begin, if I may, with Thomas Edward Patrick Brady. The lad is 39 years old now and he just completed a season in which he attempted 432 passes and was intercepted on just two of them. There have only been two qualified seasons in history with a better interception percentage than Brady’s 2016 mark of 0.5% - those were Josh McCown’s 0.4% in 2013 with the Bears and Damon Huard’s 0.4% in 2006 with the Chiefs. Both of those were flukes in which they had hot runs playing as backups, each with around 200 passes fewer than Brady managed this season. Sample size is everything here… and those two threw fewer touchdowns combined than Brady’s 28 in 2016… the best TD:INT ratio in NFL history if you were wondering.
He actually threw as many interceptions in one playoff game against the Texans as he did in the entire regular season, but it was okay coz the Pats still won by 18 points. Also the following week he responded with one of his finest ever performances against the Steelers: 32/42 for 384 yards with 3 TDs and no picks. It’s not like he was throwing behind a brick wall of an offensive line either, he was getting hit. For a 39 year old quarterback to be THIS good is not possible.
Therefore the only possible explanation is that he must have sold his soul to Satan in order to sustain his talent to such an age. Remember what happened to Peyton Manning when he got to this age? He fell of a flippin’ cliff. I mean, he won the Super Bowl but he was throwing with an arm that needed a spray of WD40 after every time he lifted it above the elbow. Tom Brady could play for five more years at the rate he’s going. If he signed a multi-year extension tomorrow, nobody would even argue.
Of the 85 players to have completed a season with a Quarterback Rating of 100.0 or better, 48 of them have been from dudes aged 30 or older. About as expected, a great quarterback peaks between the years of around 27-34, depending on injuries. Naturally 37 of those 48 were aged from 30-35. Only 11 100.0 QB Rating or better seasons have come from quarterbacks aged at least 36 and only four of those were of 105.0 or better. Brady just dropped 112.2 at age 39.
Best Single Season QB Rating, Aged 38 or Older:
- Tom Brady (2016) – 112.2, age 39
- Brett Favre (2009) – 107.2, age 39
- Tom Brady (2015) – 102.1, age 38
- Peyton Manning (2014) – 101.5, age 38
- Sonny Jurgensen (1974) – 94.5, age 40
- Kurt Warner (2009) – 93.2, age 38
- John Elway (1998) – 93.0, age 38
- Warren Moon (1995) – 91.5, age 38
Most players don’t even last this long, let alone keep on performing at this level. It’s no coincidence that every player on that list is either in the Hall of Fame, will one day be elected to the Hall of Fame or is Kurt Warner (and even he won a Super Bowl – plus is a decent shot at getting in amongst the 2017 class, his third year of eligibility).
Tom Brady was already a legend of the game five years ago. Winning a fourth Super Bowl ring at the culmination of the 2014 season only confirmed what we already knew about him: he’s one of the greatest to ever live. But a fifth ring now? Come on, bro. The rest of the league, including the long suffering AFC East (which the Patriots have won in 13 of the last 14 seasons), has been waiting patiently for this reign of terror to end and still it shows no signs. Give someone else a chance, matey.
Even Darth Vader had his Emperor though and Tom Brady might be completely brilliant but without Bill Belichick he wouldn’t have all those rings. Brady and Belichick have been together and doing this ever since an injury to Drew Bledsoe compelled Belichick to throw a sixth round draft pick under centre and the rest, as they say, is history. The most Super Bowl appearances by a coach, seven of them. The most regular season wins for a QB/Coach duo and the most post-season wins as well. Other players and coaches have come and gone throughout that time and yet Brady and Belichick have remained the constant figureheads of Patriots’ glory and stability. From Randy Moss to Rob Gronkowski, from Wes Welker to Julian Edelman, from Tedy Bruschi to Vince Wilfork and beyond.
Which leads into the prevailing trend in the Belichick Era, and you only have to look as far as their last game to see this in action. Chris Hogan caught nine passes for 180 yards, a Patriots playoffs record, twice getting into the endzone. A 28 year old receiver who only had been more of a lacrosse player than he had been a footballer back in college. Julio Jones was the star man for the Falcons in the other game that day, a man whose physical talents and ability on the gird iron set him above all but a handful of guys in his position. Chris Hogan… he was nobody.
(To be fair, that’s not completely true. He had over 600 yards receiving this season and signed on a multi-year deal after a breakthrough season with the Bills in 2015 – but before that he’d been cut by his first three NFL teams without ever making an active roster).
In a salary capped league, you can’t keep everyone and you have to be able to find depth at bargain prices if you’re gonna sustain your success over many years. We’re seeing the Seattle Seahawks deal with a little of that after their fabled Legion of Boom have all come up with expiring contracts within a few years of each other. Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas got big extensions. Kam Chancellor went on strike. Brandon Browner and Byron Maxwell left in free agency.
The two ways to do that are to draft well and get the best out of guys who were otherwise underrated elsewhere. Undrafted players and free agency cast offs. The San Antonio Spurs are famous for this, finding role players and getting crucial performances out of them. The Patriots are the same.
The key is that Belichick doesn’t place any player ahead of the team, not even Tom Brady. There’s a team culture and those ideals are the most important thing of all. These unheralded dudes who succeed with the Pats where they couldn’t elsewhere do so because they fit all that – which goes both ways. The Patriots are a DO YOUR JOB kind of team. Just run your route and if you get open, you’ll get the ball. There’s a sign on the wall at Gillette Stadium that reads: ‘Doing the right thing for the team when it might not be the right thing for you’. Ironically, by doing the best thing for the team numerous Patriots have been able to achieve the personal success that eluded them everywhere else they’d played… which then circles back into team success in a perpetuating cycle of winning.
Belichick is responsible for all of that. He holds Tom Brady as accountable as he does Joe Rookie and he leads by example with the ONE GAME AT A TIME process. He’s a grizzly old bugger but he wins like nobody else. Everyone wants a piece of it… which is why so many of his assistants have been plucked for head coaching roles in the hope that a little bit of Billy’s magic will rub off. Romeo Crennel, Al Groh, Josh McDaniels, Eric Mangini, Nick Saban, Jim Schwartz and Bill O’Brien all beneficiaries, not to mention the 19 assistants or executives to have worked under Belichick who’ve been hired away for similar roles beneath other head coaches.
Of course, Belichick also has a ruthless streak and he rarely holds onto a player longer than their use-by-date. Again, the loyalty lies with the team above all else.
They’re the best franchise in the NFL, you can’t even argue that. But it you still futilely want to (and I do), then there’s always the moral side of things. The National Football League is a business so the lack of compassion, whatever, that’s how you do well and most of the guys they get rid of end up getting well paid elsewhere on the back of their Pats careers anyway. Spygate? That’s another matter. Deflategate? Yeah, that too.
The people of Massachusetts have a nickname for themselves: ‘Massholes’. Say what you will about the way that whole ball deflating thing was handled by the NFL but the act itself was one of (very minor) cheating and it’s exactly the kind of thing the Patriots would do anyway. They’ve been exploiting loopholes and pushing legal boundaries for years.
Plus hearing Bill Simmons rant on and on about it every week for roughly two years after anyone not actively supporting the Patriots had stopped caring was… erm, let’s say frustrating. Let Cousin Sal get a word in, I wanna hear about his Tony Romo fetish. It takes a special group of fans to still harbour an inferiority complex after six consecutive AFC Championship game appearances with a seventh Super Bowl shot on the calendar.
Respect the game, sure. But Brady is a massive whinger and Belichick is an enormous dickhead. One has a quarterback’s sense of entitlement and the other treats reporters like scum. Then there’s the Trump connection, Brady occasionally referring to The Orange One as a friend and once being snapped with a Make America Great Again hat in his locker while Bill Belichick, the callous bastard, sent a letter of character endorsement to Trump and allowed him to read it out at a rally only days before the election and then had the gall to say it wasn’t political because it didn’t address policy, only character. Mate, that election was not won on policy, I can tell you that much.
These are the somewhat justifiable reasons as to why I hate these guys… but, like Wes Mantooth and Ron Burgundy, that level of hate is outweighed by one thing: respect. They’re incredible, there’s just no denying the New England Patriots. Still, it’d be bloody lovely if they lost in Super Bowl 51.