Set aside envy and appreciate greatness
Genuflect before Brady and Patriots
This is when the undisguised national contempt for the New England Patriots rears its unseemly head.
When fans of the 31 other NFL teams become so blinded by envy they cannot appreciate the living history playing out before them.
So we complain how supposedly “boring” it is that the Pats are back in the Super Bowl. We haul out unsupported conspiracy theories about favouritism. Maybe dust off a Deflategate reference, just for fun. We do everything except what we should — which is genuflect to the greatest franchise in modern American sports.
Tom Brady, at age 40, with 12 stitches in his throwing hand, is better than your team’s quarterback. Also, better looking. With a supermodel wife.
Bill Belichick is better and smarter than your team’s head coach.
Robert Kraft out-owns your team’s owner. The locomotive chugs on. Deal with it, America. Why resent what you should be admiring? Appreciate an ongoing run of greatness and dominance the NFL might not see again for generations.
The Patriots beat Tennessee, Jacksonville, the law of averages and Father Time. Brady on Sunday could have played with a catcher’s mitt protecting his injured hand and still been better than Blake Bortles. The Pats are unstoppable. They are both really good and lucky.
Now they get Philadelphia without Carson Wentz. No wonder New England opened as the biggest Super Bowl favourite (5 ½ points) in nine years.
I laughed at the recent apocryphal ESPN story about the New England dynasty rending at the seams. How, supposedly, there is tension among Kraft, Belichick and Brady.
Laughed because it rang so familiar. For at least the last five years in a row, Miami Dolphins fans and everybody else under Brady’s spell and thumb have been wishfully predicting his imminent decline, right? I mean he can’t be great forever! (Um ... can he?)
The Cinderella Jaguars winning would have been a great story in one region of extreme northeast Florida, but the rest of the country would rather root for — or more likely against — Brady and the dynastic Pats.
NBC’s ideal matchup would have been Patriots-Vikings, with Minnesota angling for its first championship as the first team to play a Super Bowl in its home stadium. But the Peacock gets a bigger market in Philly, and also the stark contrast of the Pats facing an Eagles team that has never won a Super Bowl. The Eagles last won a pre-SB title in 1960, and was so written off after Wentz’s injury that the team has adopted dog masks to represent their underdog role. (“Dogs Vs. Dynasty.” Has a ring to it).
Besides, how perfect it is, at the end of a season mired in controversy over players not standing for the national anthem, that this Super Bowl would feature one team nicknamed Patriots and the other represented by the majestic, soaring symbol of America.