Teams That Grind My Gears: The New England Patriots

For purposes of full disclosure, I have far too many people in my life who call themselves New England Patriot fans.  After Sunday night’s loss to the Baltimore Ravens, I have found myself besieged with their caterwauling about bad officials, Joe Flacco, and every other reason they can think of to distract themselves from the fact they lost yet another big game.

1) The Patriots Are Another Team With Shitty Fans

Now, because the Patriots haven’t sucked for decade now, the ranks of their fans have swelled to include the fairweather butt-loafs that populate not only Boston and the greater Northeast, but includes generally obnoxious front-runners from everywhere else. You know the guy I’m talking about; the guy who wears a Tom Brady jersey (which always seems to come off in sub-freezing temperatures) despite the fact he weighs as much as a small car, who thinks “FAAAAAAAAAAAAACKYOU! YOUSUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKK! is witty repartee, and who couldn’t tell you who Steve Grogan and John Hannah were.

See, most of the so-called hometown Patriots fans are dickrings who simply change out of their “Big Papi” jersey to a “Tom Brady” jersey every September.  What they know about football would fit in their ass with plenty of room for their head left over.  It would be a minor miracle if any of them could name a Patriot other than Tom Brady.

In a lot of respects, the Patriot fan base is much like that of the Cowboys; in the sense there’s a small group of real fans who will still be around after Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are drooling on each other’s catheters at the nursing home, and then there’s a bunch of luxury box front-runners, and guys named “Tommy Boy” and “Sully” who once the Pats are back to being a 6-10 team will be back screaming racial epithets at black hockey players.

If it weren’t for the aforementioned Cowboys’ fans, Vikings’ fans, or Raiders’ fans, Patriot fans would be the worst in all of football. They hate Jets fans even though they are exactly like Jets fans.  They are just like Jets fans because half of Foxboro is Jets fans on any given Sunday.

Its true.  I have several trusted friends who also happen to be Patriot season-ticket holders (they would be small group of “real” Patriots fans).  They will be the first to tell you that Gillette Stadium and the town of Foxboro is the worst place in the world for real football fans.  The Patriots fans who show up at the stadium are either the shirtless Brady jersey owners,  who by the end if the first quarter already stink like their own piss, or they are what is commonly referred to as the “wine and cheese” crowd.

It’s hard to tell which is more hate-worthy; the guy in the stocking cap who will undoubtedly puke on himself at some point while screaming what you are pretty sure is some sort of racial insult, or the guy who spends half of every game telling everyone to sit down. Of course, “Mr. Sit Down” is the same guy who only shows up for the “best” 2 or 3  games of the year and sells the rest of his tickets to Jets fans.

If you doubt them, pay close attention to the seats the next time you see a Patriots game. You will notice the red seats in the middle of Gillette Stadium. That’s where the big-time “wine and cheesers” who own luxury boxes also have the option of sitting outside.  This means that many seats go empty which makes Gillette Stadium the quietest in all of football.

These friends of mine can regail with all kinds of tales of Patriot fan dumb-assery, ranging from hearing the offense booed off the field for driving for a game-winning field goal (the crowd wanted a touchdown) to throwing stuff at Troy Brown – in one of the last games of his career – for botching a punt return.

In any case, both “Tommy Boy” and “Mr. Wine and Cheese”-type Patriot fans are like the turd-baby result of a Jets fans ass-raping a Notre Dame fan; they are obnoxious, dim, and keep reminding you they are better than they really are.

Most importantly, the “Tommy Boys” and “Sullys” of the world have this truly messed-up notion that being a loudmouth cynical ass-wipe equals being a tough guy. These are the guys who watch Mark Walhberg movies and fondle themselves, these are the guys who get tougher with each Sam Adams they pound, and these are the same guys who wake up in a puddle of their own piss and teeth after they screamed the wrong thing at the wrong dude.  There’s nothing tough about these red-and-blue creampuffs.  They are the same guys who are calling sports-radio today wailing like a rotating ball of vag-bitches just using Sunday night’s completely predictable loss as yet another excuse to showcase their brooding moronic bullshit.  The fact is that it would take like two or three Raider at the most fans to kick the living shit out of every Patriot fan on earth.  These Patriot fans are softer than a Memory Foam pillow made out of marshmallows and puppy fur.

Sadly, like the Cowboys’ fanbase, that of the Patriots’ lumps in the real fans with the soft-ass “Tommy Boys” and “Sullys.”

2) Cheating Is OK When You Have The League’s Biggest Star

Hopefully, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the never-ending knob-slob fest of the Patriots, Bill Belichick, and Tom Brady.  As despicable as ESPN is, at least they’ve spent the morning raking Belichick over the coals for grabbing one replacement referees after last night’s game. That’s just another perfect example of what pussies the Patriots and their fans are.  Playing “tough guy” with a replacement referee is like bullying the handicapped kid at school.  Bill Belichick has spent the better part of the last decade getting a complete pass from the media, and it’s time to face a fact…there’s a reason why the Patriots haven’t won a Super Bowl since 2004.

There’s no coincidence between the exposure of “Spygate” and the fact the Patriots have become a reasonbly bad play-off team.  According to Bryan O’Leary’s book  Spygate: The Untold Story Tom Brady knew the defensive calls ahead of time on over 70 percent of his snaps, and makes a case the NFL helped to cover-up the scandal in the first place.

…a new book entitled “Spygate the Untold Story,” suggests the league successfully covered up and minimized the New England spying scandal.

By destroying the tapes quickly, fining the Patriots and taking away a draft pick, but not suspending coach Bill Belichick, commissioner Roger Goodell convinced the public it was a minor matter that didn’t have a big impact on the Patriots’ success.

But author Bryan O’Leary contends it was a key to their three Super Bowl victories and suggests the Patriots might be still doing it in their home stadium, where it’s easy to hide a camera in an obscure place.

O’Leary says it wasn’t just the filming the signals that made the plan work. The Patriots, he wrote, also had a radio frequency to quarterback Tom Brady’s helmet that didn’t click off with 15 seconds left before the play clock runs down — the way the league frequency does.

Ernie Adams, a close confidant of Belichick’s, who is noted for his ability to read defenses, but whose duties have been never publicly defined, is the person in Brady’s ear via their secret frequency, O’Leary writes. He added that Adams can talk to Brady until the ball is snapped and even afterward to alert Brady to the open receiver.

Uhh, yeah, that’s pretty much a full-on cheat.  But it does explain a lot.

It explains why Brady now sucks in the post-season.  I understand that Brady’s 5 Super Bowl appearances and 3 Super Bowl wins is a major accomplishment, but it’s also fair to look at Brady’s playoff performances in the years since the last of the those Super Bowl wins at the end of the 2004 season.  In 12 play-off games since the last Super Bowl win, Tom Brady and the Patriots are only 7-5.  More astounding are the stats for  an average Tom Brady performance in those games: 23/36, 64% completion percentage, 256 yards, 2.17 touchdowns, and 1.42 interceptions.

Most of those numbers are acceptable, the touchdown to interception ration is the killer.  For a guy who is supposed to be a great pure passer, and for a guy who holds that record of 358 consecutive passing attempts without an interception, having more 3 INT games than 0 INT games in your last 12 playoff performances needs an explanation.

In turn, Brady’s post-season mediocrity explains why the Patriots haven’t won a Super Bowl since 2004.

It also explains why “offensive genuises”  like Charlie Weis and Josh McDaniels turned to into the coaching equivalent of crunchy cat piss the minute they left New England.

But at the same time, it doesn’t explain why the media types and the same league that swore the Saints’ Bounty Scandal was the worst thing in the history of the NFL turned a blind eye to the fact that what the Patriots did was a far more egregious affront to Roger Goodells’ concern about the “integrity of the game.”

I’m waiting for the day I hear the words “Tom Brady is over-rated” coming out of ESPN. I will be waiting a while, but that day got a bit closer after Sunday night.

3) Colin Cowherd Is The World’s Biggest Patriot Fan, And Even He Won’t Tell You The Truth

There’s no shortage of sycophantery for Tom Brady and the Patriots, but there’s nobody worse than Colin Cowherd.  If Brady dropped his shorts and made his minions form a line to determine the order in which they would be allowed to service him, Cowherd would have the first fours spots at the head of the line.

This helps to explain why “Spy-Gate” got swept under the rug, but it also explains something many non-New Englanders who call themselves Patriot fans likely did not know.  This may be hard to fathom, but before 2001, the Patriots were the red-headed step child of Boston area sports, and in many respects, still are.

You are never going to hear that fact come out of the blow-dries at ESPN, largely because they either don’t know that, or don’t want you to know that.  The fact that even in Boston, nobody likes the Patriots ruins the ESPN-created narrative that New England is the model NFL franchise where everything is happiness and sunshine.  Except for one big fact…Boston fans only now like the Patriots because they’ve won recently.  But every year they don’t win another Super Bowl, they creep back to the back of the Boston sports bus.

The Patriots without a Lombardi Trophy are just on the road back to days when they weren’t just unpopular in Boston…they were absolutely fucking despised.  They weren’t ignored, they were HATED. They didn’t have the championship tradition of the Celtics, nor did they have the perpetual hard-luck stories of the Red Sox, and until recently, you could watch the Bruins without having to see “any of them damn spades.”

In short, Boston was more than happy to treat the Patriots like an orphaned crack baby. All during the franchises time in Boston, they never had a home field, they roamed like football gypsies.  In 11 seasons, the Patriots’ played home games in four different venues; Nickerson Field, Harvard Stadium, Fenway Park, and Alumni Stadium all served as home fields for the Patriots. In the 1970’s the Patriots left Boston for a shit-heap of a stadium in Foxboro.

Foxboro Stadium was built functionally obsolete. It was built as cheaply as possible because nobody wanted to spend money on the Patriots.  It lacked luxury boxes and most patrons had to sit on backless aluminum benches as only a small fraction of the stadium had actual seats (painted blue, red, and white near the 50-yard line).  This stadium was such a joke that twice in the last 20 years, owners had to threaten to move; with a capacity of just over 60,000, it was one of the smallest stadiums in the NFL.  James Orthwein bought the team from Victor Kiam in 1992, and had plans to move the team to St. Louis, but he sold the team two years later to current owner Robert Kraft.

The sainted “Mr. Kraft” then threatened to move the team to Hartford  in order to get a new stadium built in Foxboro, and Patriot fans line up to blow him as if he weren’t some hopeless drunk who made going to a Patriots game an exercise in sitting in traffic for four hours to buy the most expensive tickets in the NFL.  Oh, it will also cost you $40 to park in the absolute middle of nowhere to spend four hours with some of the worst crowds in the NFL.  To top it all off, you will be stuck in your car for hours after the game. because nobody thought it might be a good idea to build a road better than a cattle trail to Kraft’s bucolic  splendor.

This actually brings back to the media. In this case, it is the local Boston sports media market that really shows off what dipshit Patriots fans are, because the Boston sports media is horrible. They fellate Robert Kraft because he hired a cheater and didn’t move the team.  If Rob Gronkowski were black, his behavior would have gotten him run out of town regardless of production (see Mo Vaughn). Can you imagine the way Tom Brady would be treated in Boston if he were black and had the gall to marry a white super-model, considering the way they treated Joe Kapp and Jim Plunkett simply because they were Mexican? The second Brady and Belichick leave or begin to suck, all the “lifelong” Patriot fans will stop going to the games and the Pats will go back to blackouts and 4th-class sports citizenry.

4) Keeping Patriots Fans Talking About “Spy-Gate” Means They Aren’t Paying Attention To The Beginning Of The End 

There’s no better troll-bait subject for Patriots fans than “Spy-Gate.”  We all know from the first time I brought up that subject in this piece, there was some Patriot fan sharpening his crayon to give some 1500-word screed about how:

• It just wasn’t fair.
• The Patriots didn’t really cheat because the rule was that you are allowed to have video cameras in the stands, not on the sideline (which is NOT true).
• The punishment didn’t fit the crime.

The fun part is that while spending all that time trying to turn wrong into right,  the average Patriot fan has not only completely forgotten that the 11 years are the exception, not the norm.  These people think it is the Patriots birthright to win every year, and that the four decades of absolute dogshit that preceded 2001 never happened.

This means as we speak, Patriot fans are ignoring several crucial facts that are apparent to the rest of us.

• Bill Belichick is showing the early signs of senility.

If you doubt that, just look the drafting and personnel moves of Belichick the “Genius.”

1. The Patriots passed on B.J. Raji, Brian Orakpo, Brian Cushing, and Clay Matthews (twice) in the first round of the 2009 draft because they did not fit into Belichick’s obsolete defensive scheme.
2. That same off-season, Bill Belichick traded a third and fifth round pick to the Raiders for Derrick Burgess, who was old, used up, and soon out of the league after this trade.  In other words, the “Genius” Belichick got fleeced by Al Davis.  To be fair, later in 2009 Belichick got some of that back when he traded Richard Seymour to the Raiders for a first-round pick in the 2011 NFL Draft, which the Patriots used to draft Nate Solder.
3. The Patriots cut Brandon Merriweather and James Sanders, then lost a Super Bowl because the remaining safeties couldn’t cover a five-foot table with a ten-foot table cloth.
4. Even now, this means Belichick’s defensive backfield consists of the multi-talentless Devin McCourty, the future-performing Steve Gregory, the under-performing Patrick Chung, and the never-performing Kyle Arrington.
5. Patriots fans have had to constantly flinch on the linebacker corps since 2006.  Watching Chad Brown and Monty Beisel as the starting middle linebackers in 2006  had to hurt. It couldn’t be any better today watching human blocking sleds like Dont’a Hightower, Brandon Spikes, and the chronically over-rated Jerod Mayo.  Oh, and Tedy Bruschi never didn’t suck.
6. The Patriots took Laurence Maroney over Maurice Jones-Drew in the 2006 draft.  I could write a whole blog on the sorry-ass history of Patriot running backs since Cory Dillon and Curtis Martin.  It even pre-dates those two…how about some shit-heaps like Craig James and Marion Butts (not Belichick’s fault, but it does indicate the Patriots really don’t understand the running back position).
7. The Patriots could have had Mike Wallace, but decided Jabar Gaffney was the best option.

• Bill Belichick gets a pass for having a team every bit as sloppy with discipline as the one Rex Ryan gets criticized for.

Patriots fans are now foaming at the mouth as they read this, and while they are foaming, they are forgetting they have a star quarterback who likes to model with dog collars and go cliff diving in South America instead of working out in the off-season and they have a start tight end who spends his off time posing with porn stars, bar-hopping, and generally acting like a douchebag frat boy.  If Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski were New York Jets, all you would read is how Rex Ryan can’t control his players/runs a “loose ship”/ is generally the worst human being ever.

• The Patriots are a regular-season wonder who can’t win in the play-offs anymore.

FACT:  In their last 2 Super Bowl seasons, the Patriots led in the 4th quarter in 37 out of 38 regular-season games, yet did not win a Super Bowl either year.

FACT: Tom Brady is one of five quarterbacks to throw for 5,000 passing yards in a season. No quarterback who threw for 5,000 yards won a Super Bowl in that same season.

FACT: Nobody is afraid of the Patriot offense anymore.

There’s a reason for this.  In the days when the Patriot offense really had coordinators losing sleep at night, they could do one of two things.  First, they had a vertical passing game that could create big plays.  The days when Tom Brady could could on a receiver who could extend the field are gone.  Defenses are willing to let Wes Welker catch 100 balls a season because none of those 3-yard passes will hurt them, and face it…Welker isn’t going to out-run anybody anymore.  I’ve never seen someone look like they were moving so fast yet cover such little ground. This is why nobody bothers to cover him anymore.

They also can’t run the ball anymore. Don’t let that freak show the  other night in Danny Woodhead fool you. They can’t run him 25 times a game and expect him to survive. The bottom line is the Patriots need a running back that isn’t comically named or 5’3″ tall.  The Patriots looked invincible last season until the New York Jets and Giants found their Achilles’ heel yet again.  The Jets beat the Patriots twice and the Giants won the Super Bowl based on one dirty little secret about the Patriots.  Once you take away their running game, their offense suddenly can’t create plays.  Look at what happens whenever the Patriots need a big offensive play at a clutch moment.  If they could have knocked out that first down which would have allowed them to run out the clock Sunday night, maybe I’m not even writing this today…

The Brady/Belichick offense needs at least the threat of a running game to keep the opposing safeties honest. Once the defensive secondary can cheat back into pass coverage, a lot of the “easy” passing lanes Brady depends on slam shut like a steel bear trap. Not to  mention, once the defense is back in coverage, the Patriot deep-passing game ceases to exist.

FACT: The Patriot defense doesn’t concern anybody anymore either.

It’s hard to imagine a group of eleven guys who were less of a factor on a play-off team that the Patriots defense.  When will a real Patriot fan have the balls to quit drinking the Boston Kool-Aid and admit that Bill Belichick’s devotion to building a defense of “established veterans” (meaning used-up old farts and useless retreads) doesn’t fucking work? The Patriot defense sucks on whole wheat toast, and yet Belichick is heralded for being a personnel genius despite the facts that he has no idea how to use all those draft picks he stockpiles to acquire and develop actual talent.

Belichick keeps bringing in has-beens like Sean Ellis, Gerard Warren, and Albert Haynesworth to run his version of a 3-4 defense built around a) grotesquely fat defensive lineman who play 2-gap and don’t rush the quarterback, b) edge rushers who don’t get to the quarterback either, and c) a secondary made up of yesterday’s heroes and tomorrow’s failures.  Belichick’s version of defense only works against 20-year old offensive schemes (or the Jets today, who the Patriots STILL can’t beat) where quarterbacks took their snaps from under center, teams ran the ball 70% of the time, and there were hardly ever more three or fewer pass catchers on the field in almost all formations.  In other words, when the NFL became a living, breathing, fantasy football league in the 2000’s, Belichick’s defensive scheme became obsolete nearly a full decade before he realized it and drafted a pass rusher.

Julian Fucking Edelman has actually got snaps at defensive back. Need I say more?

5) The Conclusions

The Patriots are still a play-off team; in fact they could easily be the first team to lose five Super Bowls.  But when the Belichick/Brady era comes crashing down in a few year, nobody’s going to feel bad for the real Patriots fans because thy picked up so many douche-hammers amongst their ranks.

For me, I’m just tired of hearing about them. They haven’t won a Super Bowl in eight years, and yet the Colin Cowherds of the world would lead you to believe the New England Patriots are the greatest franchise in the history of ever.

They aren’t. In fact, this season will mark the beginning of the end.

Right now in Boston, there are two full-time FM radio stations dedicated to propagating the uninformed, self-indulgent whining of the luckiest fan base in professional sports.  If you don’t want to buy that description of Patriots’ fans, roll the clock back to Week 10 of last year.  The Patriots record at that time was 5-3, and all three of their losses were tight games that they lost by a total of 15 points.  More than half of the team’s starters at defensive back are on injured reserve, but the toughest game remaining on their schedule is a Week 17 home game against Buffalo.

But in Boston, that just wasn’t good enough for fans who fucking hated this team 15 years ago.  They’ve got a 5-3 record, a cream-puff schedule in a lousy division,  one of the most productive offenses in the history of the NFL, and a guaranteed first-ballot hall-of-fame quarterback.  At this point, the average Boston pointy-head is calling sports-radio and bleating shit like “Bill Belichick sucks at personnel decisions.” Yeah, I know I just said that, but I’m also not one of the troglodyte Patriot fans who said crap like “Should we keep Matt Cassel and trade Tom Brady?” for three solid months in 2009. In other words, I didn’t just figure out last week that the parade has passed Belichick by.

Those are the Patriot fans who grind my gears, and I can’t wait for them to disappear once the Patriots go back to their usual state at the bottom of the NFL. Make no mistake, that is no more than a year or two from happening.  While they spend all their time whining about “Spy-Gate” or Eli Manning, they ignore the fact their team is built to go 12-4 in the regular season thanks to a soft schedule and a 5000=passing-yard offense, and then choke in the playoffs once they’re forced to run the ball, then watch Eli Manning hang three touchdowns on their sorry-ass defense in the final 70 seconds of yet another Super Bowl loss.

And in the words of Bart Scott…”CAN’T WAIT!”

About J-Dub

What your view of sports would be if you had too many concussions

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