Unbeaten not perfect plan
Pats won’t focus on potential for 19-0
Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace.” It was not about football season. Or the 2019 Red Sox. The Russian novelist also had time to codify the myth that is The Patriot Way in “Anna Karenina” with the following words: “If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
That was 19th century Russian for, “My favorite ring is the next one.”
In public, the 2019 Patriots have taken Tolstoy’s advice. There is no talk about 16-0 — or dare we say 19-0 — allowed in or around Gillette Stadium or within the TB12 training facility.
Winning creates gluttony, among players and fans.
New Englanders mortgaged their children’s souls just so that Adam Vinatieri (or Jason Varitek, depending on whom you believe) would split the uprights. That only made them want more. Fast forward a decade and Tom Brady was washed up because he could only win three Super Bowls.
Jump to February 2018 and Brady was a failure because he could not throw the ball and catch the ball against the Eagles.
The talk, nay demand, for perfection proves winning isn’t everything. Perhaps it’s nothing. Six Super Bowls into this run and anything short of a perfect championship season will be some sort of a letdown.
The dream goes something like this: The Patriots go 19-0, win Super Bowl LIV in Miami and wipe the 1972 Dolphins from the internet. Then Brady and his retired supermodel wife hop aboard a rainbow unicorn and fly away to Costa Rica, never to be seen on the football field again.
OK, maybe that’s not your dream. But it would make for one hell of an ending to the football season.
The Patriots, meanwhile, aren’t looking for perfection this season, even if it may find them.
Brady delivered the state party line on that subject earlier this week during his weekly sponsored appearance on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show.”
“I’m not thinking about anything more than 3-0 because that’s the only thing that matters,” Brady said. “That’s what we got this week. Today, wake up and I’m thinking about the Jets and how they’re going to attack us and how we need to attack them. It’s going to ebb and flow over the course of the whole season. There are big challenges ahead and to take your eye off what’s really important is a disservice to the team and we’re not doing that.”
The Czarist Russia mentality that permeates the Patriots flows seamlessly from Bill Belichick. There always is hopelessness and despair just around the corner. Even when you have outscored your last three opponents 89-6 and won a Super Bowl in the process, there are concerns about the kicker, the offensive line’s long-term health, and figuring out the right balance for the receiving corps.
Nineteen straight wins in anything is nearly impossible. There are injuries. There is the competition.
For the Patriots, the schedule toughens Week 8 when they begin a violent sixgame run that includes a home game against Cleveland, back-to-back stops at Baltimore and Philadelphia around the bye, a home game the Sunday after Thanksgiving against their likely Super Bowl LIV opponent, the Dallas Cowboys, a visit to Houston and that long-awaited AFC Championship Game rematch Dec. 8 against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Potentials obstacles all, even if just one loss among them guarantees contentment, so says Tolstoy.
The Patriots have been through all of this before. In 2007, they became the first NFL team to finish the regular season 16-0. Their pursuit of perfection that year ended in calamity befitting a 19th century Russian novel.
Maybe 18-1 will be good enough this time.