Admit It: The Super Bowl Was Better With the New England Patriots

A Dispatch from Another Time, Another Blog, the Ruins of Another Evil Empire

This essay was originally composed in January of 2020 and posted on a different blog, the title and location of which is no concern of yours. I don’t love the writing after five years, but I’ve never been more convinced my argument was right. I’m choosing to post this without edits.

Listen, I don’t like it any more than you do. Like any other fan of any other NFL team I despise the New England Patriots. I despise their twin Dark Emperors; Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick, and their joyless approach to the game of football. I despise the big smug grin of that oh-so-dashing Touchdown Tom Brady. I despise their distinguished alumni clogging up analyst spots in NFL TV coverage. I despise how they consistently get total unknown players and coaches to overperform in Belichick’s system and culture and then dupe the inbred morons who run the other 31 organizations in this league into overpaying them in a futile attempt to reverse engineer a dynasty. Fuck the Pats.

But dammit it doesn’t feel like the Super Bowl without them.

As we get ready for the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers to kick off on Sunday, it really does feel like a new era is dawning in the NFL. Teams led by accomplished veterans, some of them first-ballot hall of famers, have fallen one-by-one throughout these playoffs, leaving two teams in the midst of long title droughts helmed by young quarterbacks set to play in their first Super Bowl together. The once-unbeatable Patriot machine was no different, ground down by a hungry, young Tennessee Titans squad relishing their role as underdogs. There were no late heroics, no last second comebacks. Tom Brady dropped back to pass, maybe for the last time ever in a Patriots uniform, threw an interception, and it was over.

In a way, I’m happy. The Chiefs and 49ers are both great, exciting-to-watch teams with a lot of personality. I’m sure the game on Sunday will be a lot of fun. I was equally sure the game was going to be fun when the Seattle Seahawks blew the doors off the Denver Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl 48, or when the Broncos beat a Carolina Panthers team that stopped trying after half time 24-10 in a totally average football game called Super Bowl 50 two years later. Say what you will about the Pats, their Super Bowls are almost never boring. Whether in their original triumph against the “Greatest Show on Turf” St. Louis Rams, either of their tense slugfests with the New York Giants, the collective horror of the infamous 28-3 game against the Atlanta Falcons, the worst play call ever in the closing seconds of their encounter with the Seahawks, or the perennial underdog Philadelphia Eagles finally getting over the hump for their first Lombardi Trophy, the Patriots will shock you, surprise you, glue you to your TV, and bring bile and hatred out of you that you never knew existed but they will never bore you.

The Super Bowl is the annual finale for the soap opera that is American football. The year’s storylines all converge on one mass-media spectacle. Sometimes the game is great, sometimes it sucks, sometimes it’s just weird, but for the last two decades the Patriots have been a part of it almost constantly. The omnipresent villains of the annual festival. They were pure villains, never asking for your sympathy, and happy to crush your dreams. There’s honor in that. They never harbored delusions of grandeur like the last great villains of the NFL; the 90s Dallas Cowboys, a team so full of cocaine and Reaganite nationalism that they declared themselves “America’s Team.” At their peak; Patriots knew they were hated and relished it. Aesop said it’s easy to despise what you cannot have, and the Patriots had championships, lots of them, and your team didn’t.

I’m ranging dangerously close to an obituary here, make no mistake, the Patriots are not dead. Not as long as the Dark Lord remains on the sideline in his inexplicable sleeveless hoodie. Bill Belichick has always been the engine that makes the whole infernal machine go, driving his players to perfection and only settling for all-conquering excellence. He was always the architect of all those great teams. Countless players owe him their careers: Ty Law, Rodney Harrison, Teddy Bruschi, Wes Welker, Vince Wilfork, Danny Amendola, Randy Moss, Deion Branch, and of course; Tom Brady. His dogged defense of his unquestioned coaching crown is admirable. Whether he was repeatedly embarrassing the loud-mouthed pretender Rex Ryan and his overhyped, undercooked New York Jets, stymieing two generations of offensively brilliant Indianapolis Colts teams, or curb-stomping the so-called next big thing, Sean McVay and his Los Angeles Rams, in last year’s Super Bowl, you always got the sense he took a challenge to his dominance as a personal insult, one that can only be repaid with humiliation.

This is where I’m meant to bring up Spygate, or Deflategate, but honestly? I don’t care. I don’t think they even needed to cheat, if in fact they did. I’m a Colts fan. I watched the so-called “deflategate” game live. They could have played with a bowling ball and hung 40 on us. In the course of that horrifying, soul-deadening game it dawned on me. They were just that good. The fanbases of the perennial also-rans of the NFL love to bitch and moan about how the Pats are in some way illegitimate, but this is nothing more than a mass-coping mechanism. If we admit that the Patriots are so dominant for no other reason than the obvious; they’re better-assembled, better disciplined, and better coached than every other team in football, it doesn’t just make them harder to hate as the villains they are, it destroys all our folksy preconceptions about the great old men of the game; the Vince Lombardi’s, Tom Landry’s, and Chuck Noll’s. What were they if not proto-Belichicks? Standing on their sidelines scowling at every minor error as their squad blows the doors off of some inferior opponent. Oh you won by 20? Why didn’t you win by 30? Or 40? John Heisman arguably invented the game of football as we now know it. His Georgia Tech team once beat a totally-overmatched Cumberland College 222-0. That is not a typo. 222-0, just to prove they could. Heisman then made his squad play a 30 minute scrimmage immediately after the game. Big personalities grab headlines and capture hearts but it’s hard, joyless men addicted to nothing but victory that ultimately have the most success in this sport. Mike Ditka and his Chicago Bears did the Super Bowl Shuffle and won exactly one ring in the process. The Patriots never dance, they have six.

Now, though my feelings swing back in the opposite direction. What if this is the end? What if they’re really gone? We’ll never experience the collective elation of another Philly Special, another David Tyree helmet catch. The drama, the grand sense of good versus evil will just disappear until some new villain comes along, and who knows when that will be? When it’s really, truly over, I think I’ll miss them, despite themselves.

In the meantime drive a stake through their hearts and put a big damn rock on top of the coffin to make sure they stay down there.

JW