If you like sports – and I mean if you like sports, if you like pure athletics and competition and skill – yesterday surely had to be a great day for you, almost a repeat of the Diamondbacks or Marlins taking out the Yankees earlier this decade. Not only were the “19-0″ storylines beaten to death before the playoffs even started, and not only were sane people actually rooting for Tom Brady to have yet another ridiculously outstanding thing going for him, but for some reason people actually overlooked one crucial point:
The New England Patriots are evil. They were. They are. They probably will remain so. The masses spoke on at length about how difficut it is to dominate to such an extreme in this era of salary caps and free agency.
Lie.
The Patriots’ salary in 2007 was $105 million, second in the NFL. They have ranked at or near the top of team salaries for the past nine seasons, employing Pro Bowlers and Hall of Famers at will and trading them away just long enough to lure the next sucker. They have also won three Super Bowls, four AFC championships and six division titles since 2001.
Does this sound vaguely familiar? It should; the New England Patriots are, for all intents and purposes, the New York Yankees of football. A glamour team everyone loves for no good reason other than great marketing and the love of a major sports network. A franchise led by a charismatic superstar who no one would care about were he not surrounded by the best talent money can buy, dating supermodels and cavorting around the media capital of the world as the captain of America’s new favorite team. A revolving door of top-dollar talent.
The conventional wisdom, then, was wrong. Domination isn’t impossible in an era of free agency; for the highest bidder, it’s actually quite easy.
It’s true this has almost nothing to do with the Sox, baseball, or anything this site is supposed to address. So what? It bears mentioning anyway. In any other world, we could congratulate the Giants and their fans, but. . . come on, it’s a New York team beating a Boston team. Did anyone with a soul actually care?