To say people hate the New England Patriots because they cheat and all they receive as punishment for cheating is a slap-on-the-wrist…is an obvious answer. It’s not wrong, but it’s Captain Obvious.
To say that Bill Belichick and Tom Brady didn’t know about “Ballghazi” (I actually abhor that word. It’s just that I abhor “deflategate” or any shopworn cliche with the suffix “-gate” even worse than the word “ballghazi.”) is to insult our intelligence.
I’m with Troy Aikman on thos. Of course they knew.
Of course, it’s cheating, and OF COURSE the media is making this way more important than it really is. This is not important, but the media have been treating it like it’s LIFE OR DEATH!!! It’s approaching Tim Tebow levels of persistent, over-excessive, unneeded coverage.
One of the many star players in New England Patriots history, former linebacker Tedy Bruschi, is an Analyst for ESPN, and he did a Super Bowl Media Conference call.
Here’s what he said on the story that’s dominating headlines this week:
“I’d like to wait for the league and see what they come up with, see if they dole out any punishment. If they do, I just think that when it comes to my former team and when it comes to Coach Belichick, there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny no matter what it is.
“I think we all saw the press conference today. I can’t control what people feel about the New England Patriots, because it’s easy for this to bring out ill will, to point fingers and call for jobs and things like that and fines and draft picks because of the success that they’ve had. And of course the history of Spygate in the past.”
People do hate the New England Patriots because they win. That’s true. However, it’s far from the only reason. And people who think the team is only hated because they’re successful is either
a.) a total moronic chowderhead or
b.) someone with a full vested interested in the organization
The New England Patriots are hated because they cheat, because the media never shuts up about them and because of Bill Belichick himself- one of THE MOST disliked individuals in all of sport.
Back to Bruschi:
“Well, I guess for a lot of people he’s a hard person to like. You don’t get Rex Ryan up there. You don’t get a coach up there that’s going to give you what you want all the time. So I think there’s a lot of people that have maybe skewed opinions of him based on the past, based on the way he’s handled certain things publicly. So maybe that affects their judgment.”
So the New England Patriots hatred is multi-faceted. Also, what they did to the public perception of Rob Gronkowski is just about criminal. They took someone who was extremely colorful and interesting in public, and made him excessively corporate and vanilla. They’re depriving the sports media world of so much entertainment, and that’s reason enough to hate them.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital, eBay, Google News and CBS Interactive Inc.
You can read Banks’ feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye newspaper and listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)