An argument for the New England Patriots

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Someday, I may get around to writing a sprawling, Emile Zola-style social novel about sorrowful, rustbound, Russert-afflicted Buffalo and its inspiringly, unexpectedly mediocre Bills team that exceeded expectations by finishing 7-9 this season. I know that by most standards Buffalo’s semi-success wasn’t the story of the 2007 NFL season – which, if you’re just joining us, features an undefeated team from New England in the Super Bowl – but it’s the one I liked the most.

The Bills’ struggle to rise from a forlorn post-industrial landscape into quasi-respectability – despite an outrageous rash of injuries and the presence of Brody Jenner impersonator J.P. Losman as their starting quarterback for much of the season – is much closer to my heart than the Patriots’ quest to defeat and humiliate all (imaginary) naysayers. But winning, as we’re often told, is what the NFL is about, and the Patriots have done nothing but do that. Well, nothing but win, and fume about stuff only they understand and give laughably robotic interviews. And all that winning – all that miserable, miserable winning – has indeed made the Patriots the NFL’s defining team this season, no matter what happens in Super Bowl XLII.

Since it is my job to write about the NFL, I have spent much of this past season puzzling over the Patriots and their peculiarly sour-tempered, scowl-intensive flavor of dominance. At first, the Pats’ running up of margins of victory, their hysterical score-settling and spiking the ball off opponents’ logos and such seemed emblematic of something wrong in our culture, at least to me. “Mad vanity of power” was the term I used for it way back in Week 10, and I stand by it. I still think that there’s something in the Pats that reflects something rotten in the United States circa now: a reordering of the world with the blameless self at the center, with all pursuits collapsing on a selfish thirst for accumulation that comes from a fundamentally empty and unfillable place.

So there’s that. But from a fan’s perspective, what bugged me about the Patriots was their proud and obvious abdication of what’s qualitatively good about sports – the joy of performance and gracious happiness at playing a game for unimaginable riches – for the sake of quantifiable successes. For those of us who prize joy above success, it’s a frank bummer to see a sports team that works, thinks, and behaves like a bunch of bottom-line obsessed corporate managers, forever trying to stay one step ahead of those who would steal their (basically boring) primacy. I think my problem is with success without joy or perspective, with success for success’s sake. But I don’t know if that’s a problem the Patriots or our culture at present. I’m starting to think it’s more the latter than the former, or the latter reflected in the former.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been writing about football since late August, but lately I’ve simply accepted that winning – brilliantly, angrily, gracelessly, and inevitably – is simply what the Patriots do. They have been as consistent in their behavior as they have been in their winning, contrasting dead-eyed corporate-casual casuistry before the press and wild-eyed, spitting-mad caveman-rage on the field. They have selflessly come together to form a bleak, joyless machine of a team, but that machine really, really works.

So even though the rageful way in which the Patriots win is fundamentally kind of unpleasant and uninteresting to me, I remain awestruck before its unrelenting effectiveness. New England outscored the NFL’s second-best offense by 8.4 points per game, and outgained the second-best offense by nearly 40 yards per contest. Their quarterback and wide receiver both set single-season touchdown records, and their defense allowed the fourth-fewest points in the NFL. And, uh, they still haven’t lost. So they’re very good. And, to be fair, in their overwhelming and self-deceived need to find people to be pissed off at, to win perfectly and vanquish totally (at a game, people!), the Patriots aren’t really that different than any of the 31 other NFL teams that motivate through redirected resentment and a repackaged corporate questing for totality. Not that different, that is, except that they’re much better at football. And so of course, like anyone else who has followed the NFL this season – and despite the fact that I grew up a Giants fan – I’m fairly certain that the Patriots will win Super Bowl XLII.

By this point, the Patriots’ few weaknesses are pretty well known: the middle of their secondary is filled with old, comparatively slow dudes – starting LB Junior Seau, if you were wondering, was drafted three spots below Jeff George in 1990 – and is thus vulnerable both to slippery running backs who catch passes and big, punishing backs who can get to the second level. The Giants have both, in Ahmad Bradshaw and Brandon Jacobs, respectively. The Pats cornerbacks are also vulnerable to tall, talented receivers, of which the Giants also have one in Plaxico Burress, who devoured Pats CB Ellis Hobbs in Week 17. But this is simple match-up stuff, and while it’s not wrong and probably not unimportant in gauging the outcome, it is probably moot as long as the Patriots offense does what it has done all season long.

And that’s not necessarily dominate – they haven’t been scoring as much, or winning by as much, as they were earlier in the season – so much as it’s wear teams down, keep teams guessing, and not make mistakes. It’s what they did to the Giants in Week 17, when they methodically came back from a 12-point second half deficit, and it’s what the Patriots have done to everyone else they’ve played. The Giants have a very good defense that’s currently playing better than it has all season, but their secondary is not any better equipped to cover the Patriots corps of wide receivers than any other NFL unit. Which is a long way of saying that it is not equipped for that task.

And so barring something very surprising, the Patriots will go, snarling, into the record books. They’re a team that fits both their fan base – a terminally aggrieved admixture of yuppies and louts – and their era. In their surly brilliance, the Patriots are inarguably a team of our time: insecure, secretive and sour even as they win, they’re pursuing perfection in such a way that – because of how joylessly they’ve pursued it – they will make perfection seem less desirable upon achieving it. The best team in NFL history will, whatever the outcome of this game, have at least one enduring achievement to its name: in their vengeful, monomaniacal fury, they’ve made 7-9 look a lot more inspiring than 19-0.