Say what you will and make all the jokes you want: But you can’t honestly say you dislike Tom Brady, the quarterback and person. He’s the American Dream: start with very little, get an incredible break, and never let go. You can dislike Randy Moss if you think he was a jerk in Minnesota, but you cannot deny that to watch him in full stride is a thing of football beauty. You can find plenty of reasons that Bill Belichick rubs you the wrong way. But you cannot argue with the absolute precision with which his team plays, how hard his team plays and how well he typically game-plans. What are we getting at here? If you dislike the New England Patriots in terms of their on-field product or their general existence, it is likely because of envy. You wish your team was that good, that cool. Are they cocky? Absolutely. But to a degree, they’ve earned it. They are not a team that, when you watch them from a pure technical standpoint, you love to hate. Belichick is the closest thing to a true lightning rod, but he’s too vanilla and awkward to take seriously. Besides, rarely does a coach define public opinion of a team.

So: What we’ve noticed in the past — and much more acutely in the past, oh, 36 hours — is that the anti-Patriots sentiment comes from a strange source: it’s not a dislike of the team, it’s a dislike of many of the folks who root for the Patriots. (Go ahead and Google “Patriots hate” and you’ll get a sense of this; that’s where we found the above image). People weren’t rooting so much for the Giants to knock off New England on Sunday as they were rooting for the chance to knock their Massachusetts-based friends down a peg the next day. Now: Maybe some of these fans bring it on themselves. Maybe they don’t know how to be good fans of great teams (this series of Deadspin e-mails explains this phenomenon very well, and the part about being down for so long making the fans insufferable now that the teams are winning strikes a chord and makes us really worried about the upcoming Peterson/Jefferson sports dynasty in the Twin Cities). Nonetheless, this seems a very peculiar phenomenon to us: Hating fans as a basis for hating a team. Then again, we laughed when we saw this the other day and wondered if we should send it to Boston friends. Still, we think it’s a pretty messed up reason for rooting against a team. Your thoughts?

Fasola-link! Obligatory Bobby Knight clip. (Plenty of naughty words, kids, so watch out).
Bonus Fasola-link! Vocab check. We could find some inappropriate uses of the word “repastinate,” that’s for sure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 8:09 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.