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A Great Big Bucket of FailSurveying the aftermath of the Patriots' Super Bowl defeat.

By Charles P. Pierce
Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 3:20 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

OK, dammit, now what? The wiseguys in Vegas already have installed the Patriots as favorites to win next year's Super Bowl, but the franchise is in for an off-season of deep soul-searching. If it wasn't plain to Robert and Jonathan Kraft before, most of America has come truly to dislike their football team. Some of it is jealousy. Some of it is a desire to see the champion fall. But, for an ownership that has rightly prided itself on being fan-friendly, the hostility engendered by this team during Super Bowl week had to be daunting. Most of it circulated around Bill Belichick, with whom football America seems to be fed up. For most of the week, Belichick was as charming as most of his acolytes tell you he can be, which is very charming indeed. However, once Arlen Specter got all up in Roger Goodell's grill about the destruction of the Spygate tapes, you could almost see the Gates of Mordor close around the team and its coach again. (For the benefit of those of you scoring at home, Specter began his public career by, ah, creatively debunking the notion of a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy and is now ending it by intimating that there is a conspiracy to protect the New England Patriots. If only Abraham Zapruder had been around to film the signals of the New York Jets, Specter might have been inclined to lay off.)

Belichick then found himself outcoached by Tom Coughlin, to which he responded by leaving the field one second early and thereupon engaging in a series of public interviews so grim and boorish that they made the collected oeuvre of Bob Knight look like Mardi Gras. It has now been three seasons between Super Bowls, so the "at least he wins" excuse is less tenable than it's ever been. If there actually is more to the Spygate story, and if it turns out that the Patriots staff misled the commissioner's office in the
original investigation last fall, Belichick's not going to have two votes in the room. He's already cost the franchise a quarter-million dollars and a first-round draft pick. Were he to get suspended, the public relations debacle would be infinitely worse for a team that doesn't need another one.

On the field, well, they're still awfully good. They need to get younger at linebacker, and they need to decide if left tackle Matt (two false starts) Light is one step over the hill and whether Ellis Hobbs, who got beat on the game-winning touchdown, will ever be a big-time cornerback, especially if Asante Samuel, who actually is one, takes the money and runs in the off-season. But, thanks to the complete ineptitude that is the San Francisco 49ers, the Patriots have the seventh overall pick in the draft. Consider: Two years ago, they got beat in the second round of the playoffs; last year, they had the eventual world champions beaten until the last minute; and this year, they got all the way to the last 35 seconds of the Super Bowl with the lead. This is a young team on the way up, I'm thinking.

Sad, isn't it?

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Charles P. Pierce is a writer for the Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer at Esquire. His book Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything is out in paperback.
Photograph of Bill Belichick by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images.
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