I've been hearing and reading all the Patriot-hate after they beat they pre-anointed Chargers last week.  It seems like folks  -- not just Charger fans -- are actually angry at the Patriots for eliminating the team that was supposed to win the Super Bowl.  This was their year.  L.T.'s a God.  Rivers is sharp.  Their 'roided up D is a force of nature. Marty's... well, Marty's still Marty, but they just hope he doesn't screw it up for them again this year.  Which he promptly did.  And still they hate the Patriots.

The blogosphere & talk shows call them "boring".  They say "here we go again", the Patriots beating someone they're not supposed to beat, with less talent and no flash.  They get lucky.  They get all the calls.  They have no "stars".  Their coach doesn't rant and rave and ####-slap unsuspecting podiums (OK, maybe photographers) or throw coolers onto the field, and he hates talking to the media.  In fact, he mumbles when he talks, says nothing of substance, and gives us no information about his team or gameplans.

Boooo-ring.   Right?  Wrong.

What's boring to me is watching players act like they just won the Super Bowl after they catch a 5 yard pass, on 2rd & 8, in the 7th game of the season, while playing for a 1-5 team.  It's intolerably boring to listen to a 3rd-string wide receiver thank his hands for "being so great", or to hear a premier future Hall Of Famer tell his teammates how he "loves me some me!"  Freaking SNORE.  A coach losing his marbles at a press conference and chirping "playoffs?!" a hundred times, or flinging office supplies at cameramen is fun for a second, but it's all been done before.  Ad infinitum.  Players and coaches acting like 6-year-olds, living like movie stars, and playing the game with "flash" and "style" isn't entertaining any more.  It's old and it's played out.  It's been done.  For 40 years now.  Move on.

That's why I call the New England Patriots the most entertaining team in the NFL, not the least.  What I get the biggest kick out of is watching Bill Belichick torture the relentless, parasitic media -- and in turn the ravenous, lobotomized fans -- by giving press conferences full of mutterings, grunts, and talking for 5 minutes while saying absolutely nothing.  I want a coach like Belichick who is a mad scientist, who barely remembers to put on pants to coach the game, much less a nice shirt, and is obsessed with winning to the point that it becomes OCD, instead of slick motivational-speaker coaches like Jon Gruden or Brian Billick.  Belichick says nothing to the media because 1) he hates them, and 2) he knows that giving away one single iota of information about his team gives his opponents -- present and future -- a slight edge on his team.  Information is like gold in the coaching world, hence the endless scouting reports, stat breakdowns, and film analysis.  What gives a team a winning edge is knowing more stuff about them than they know about you. So he wears his hoodies and says nothing.  And I am entertained.

Watching 84-year-old, 170-pounds-soaking-wet Troy Brown running around on both sides of the ball, year after year, always seeming to be in the middle of the action when a big play is needed, is far more entertaining to me than watching Michael Strahan heft his aching old bones into a 16-inch vertical leap and mimic a jump shot that would have been swatted into the 3rd row of a real basketball game, or seeing Ray Lewis wrack his body into epileptic spasms, when they do nothing but hit a guy real hard.  Wow, congratulations, you made a good defensive football play.  Now go throw a smart block on special teams like Troy Brown, or catch a touchdown pass like Mike Vrabel, and we'll talk about entertainment.  Celebrations and trash talk don't entertain me anymore, good football does.

Don't get me wrong, I used to love players with style, flash, 'zazz, quick tempers and self-aggrandizing arrogance -- when I was 15.  But now, can we please move beyond this adolescent, WWF mentality that pervades professional sports?  This tedious repetition of juvenile, bush-league antics is just plain tiresome, and the longer it goes on, the more childish it gets.  When a high school football player makes a big play, he stands up, pumps his first, hi-fives his teammates, and gets back in the huddle for the next play.  When an NFL player makes a big play, he screams, points at the overhead camera, stomps off away from his teammates, does his patented celebration dance, hand-flashes his endorsement deal, and frantically thumps on his chest, both physically and metaphorically.  You tell me, who's more juvenile, the 16-year-old high schooler or the world-class "grown-up" millionaire?

"Flash" is no longer flashy to me.  Things that have flash or style are things that are different from the norm, and there is no edge, style, or flash anymore in outrageous athletes.  It's old, it's tired, and overall BORING.  Watching players and coaches drive the media and fans insane by saying nothing is just damned hilarious. Watching them topple Super Bowl favorite after Super Bowl favorite for the last six years, while having virtually no "stars", has been invigorating and inspiring.  The New England Patriots' blue-collar, no-nonsense, team-first, win-at-any-cost attitude is what real style is.  It's different, it's edgy, it's infuriating, it's brutal, and because of it the Patriots are the most entertaining team in the NFL.   

It's been interesting to see the "big three" pro sports finally begin to acknowledge fantasy sports in the last year or two.  Note that I didn't say "good" or "bad" -- just interesting.  At first they seemed to be hesitant, looking at fantasy sports as a fad at best, and at worst a distraction to the real game.  But as cyber-world took a true foothold in America, they (most importantly) realized the sheer number of fans that participate in fantasy sports, and hence spend more money on everything from gambling to gear.  Personally, I have about three fantasy teams per sport going at any given time, which is a heckuva head spinner in the fall.  Yes, I'm a big ol' nerd.  And my home start page looks like the line wall at Pimlico.

And yes, I live on Fantasy Isthmus, surrounded on three sides by those "big 3" sports.  Right now, pretty much every Sunday at my house starts the same way, with the same neurotic conversation (teams & players are interchangeable): "OK, we need to root for the Cowboys to beat the Seahawks, of course, but we need it to be a low-scoring game because we have Seattle's D.  But we have Terry Glenn, so we need Seattle to go ahead early, so Dallas will have to come back and beat them with long, downfield bombs.  Which, however, can only result in field goals (and maybe 1 Terry Glenn TD, with a missed extra point so they don't get over 10) since we can't have too many points scored on Seattle's D.  OK, so... we need Dallas to win 9-7, with their 9 points coming off five different 85-yard drives in the last 2 minutes of the game-- one ending in the Terry Glenn touchdown and missed extra point, one ending in a field goal, and the other three ending in interceptions (more points for me!).  I mean, that's not so much to ask, is it?

It sure would be nice sometimes just to be able to say, "Go Cowboys."

Which begs the question, 'Are fantasy sports good for sports?'  On one hand, it brings more fans into the games and the players, and adds dimensions to each sport that were never there before.  How else would I have known that Darren Sproles gets 25.2 yds per kick return?  Why would I have cared that Neil Rackers kicked 5 field goals over 50 yards last year, and already has 6 this year?  Without fantasy sports, I would be stuck in the old I-know-my-favorite-team-and-star-players-and-every
body-else-sucks mode, which a lot of fans get mired in.  The casual fan is able to see the entire league more clearly, and the X's-and-O's make more sense than him/her than ever before.  On the other hand, we also get drawn into the never-ending vortex of stats, stats, and more stats, and the intangibles get lost.  'Quick, I only have 5 minutes before games start today!!  I have to know what Jeremy Affeldt's WHIP percentage is when he plays an away game at night, in a dome, on his mother's birthday, in a leap year, on a day that starts with "T"!!!  And I have to know right now!!'  A prime example where stats are overrated is Michael Vick.  I hear analysts yammering on about how he's the worst QB in the NFL because he has a career QB rating of 76.7, a career completion percentage of 54.2, and has never thrown for more than 16 TD's.  The next moment, another analyst calls him one of the premier QB's in the league, a perennial MVP candidate, and one of the most amazing players he's ever seen.  How can there be such a disparity in opinions over one player?  Because analysts and fans get bogged down by stats, and can't/won't look at the overall picture of what a player does for his team, and where they would be without him.  Guys like Michael Vick and Tom Brady are mediocre fantasy players, but are absolutely invaluable to their teams and are potential hall-of famers. 

The stats can hurt the game if we're not careful, and fantasy sports are a big culprit there.  But because of fantasy sports, more people are there to know and care about those stats than any time in sports history.

Gotta run now -- I have to go see what Peja Stojakovic's free-throw percentage is during home games in December, against teams with green uniforms that have an assistant coach with a moustache.  

RCW