Soon we’ll be shifting into non-stop focus on Super Tuesday, but before we do so, we still have some detritus from Super Sunday left to sift through. A new BDS has swept the land – Belichick Derangement Syndrome. One would think the coach’s super-comeuppance would at least momentarily mollify his legions of detractors. Sadly, it hasn’t worked out that way. The sufferers of Belichick Derangement Syndrome tend to focus on two things: 1) Belichick’s Post-Game Conduct – One of the Belichick-critic’s consistent whining-points all year has been the insufficient joviality Belichick often shows when shaking the hands of the coaches that he vanquishes. So you would have thought that Belichick’s sprint across the field to not only shake Tom Coughlin’s hand but to give him an Alan Alda-esque hug would have delighted the BDS sufferers. Au contraire! Instead they have focused on the fact that Belichick left the field while one second remained on the clock. They could give Belichick the benefit of the doubt and figure that he assumed the game was over, which is why he left the field. After all, one doesn’t usually run across the field to hug the other coach before the game has concluded. But sufferers of the new BDS don’t give the object of their ire the benefit of the doubt. 2) Spygate Renewed – Over the Super-weekend, a new allegation regarding the Spygate scandal surfaced, this one centering on the Patriots allegedly taping the Rams’ walk-through prior to Super Bowl XXXVI. According to the anti-Belichick whispering campaign, a former Patriots team employee holds the proverbial smoking gun here – the footage of the Rams walking through their final Super Bowl practice. Such is the dementia of the typical BDS sufferer that he doesn’t realize the inherent contradictions within this theory. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Patriots dispatched an employee to tape the Rams and they then made full use of that tape. (To help the theory along, we’ll ignore the fact that the tape allegedly provided the Patriots with the goods on the Rams’ red zone offense, and yet the Rams went 2 for 2 in the red zone that day.) But here’s the part I really don’t get – according to the theory, the Patriots used this incendiary footage, and yet a copy of it remains in possession of the employee who did the taping? So the Patriots, after breaking down the footage for full exploitation purposes, then gave the 23 year-old employee the tape back? As a souvenir, perhaps? Or, assuming there is no tape, are we just to take the word of an apparently disgruntled former employee, whose memory got jostled only six years after the fact? If the tape remains in the possession of the team’s former employee, could it possibly mean anything else than that the guy took the footage, but the Patriots never used it? Let us pity the poor BDS sufferers, who because of their illness will lack the capacity to reason their way through this situation.
NOW, ON A PERSONAL NOTE, I must address an intemperate prediction that I made in the run-up to Sunday’s game. “There will be a rout on Sunday,” I huffily wrote. “The greatest team in the history of professional sports, the undefeated 2007-2008 New England Patriots, will be the ones doing the routing.” Whoops! In that same blog-post, my judgment obviously impaired by parochial enthusiasms, I mocked the predictive skills of former NFL star Ken “The Hutch” Hutcherson, the designated football swami for the Rush Limbaugh Show who had selected the “hungry-eyed Giants, maybe in a rout.” Whoops again! Yesterday I heard from the Hutch along with several other people who were delighted over my misery and embarrassment. (It was only thanks to the modern miracle known as Caller ID that I was able to avoid my uncle’s ritualistic taunting phone call from Santa Fe. He initiated this sadistic tradition approximately two minutes after the ball went through Bill Buckner’s legs.) The Hutch and I have exchanged emails, and have smoked the proverbial peace-pipe. I’m even that close (I’m holding my thumb and index finger a millimeter apart) to convincing him to help me with my picks next year in The Weekly Standard’s football pool (played for recreational purposes only, of course). Now on to Super Tuesday!
