Eli Manning: 'Wait a Minute, I'm Terrible'

Now that that's out of the way, all that remains in the pursuit of NFL justice is a revocation of the Giants' Tecmo Bowl title.

Patriots, Act

For the last few weeks, as the regular baseball season began to drag its feet toward the playoffs and sports fans' attention began to wander toward autumn (in most cases because their fantasy baseball teams and/or their actual baseball teams and/or both were already in the crapper), people have been asking me, a fairly outspoken New England Patriots fan, if I am excited about the start of the NFL season.

Surprisingly--perhaps to no one more so than myself--my answer has been: "Enh."

The fact is, I'm mad at the Patriots. Not because they lost the Super Bowl last season and not because they fell one game short of historic perfection...but because those things happened as a direct result of the fact that the Patriots bought into their own hype. There's nothing wrong with a team believing that it can't be beat--one could even make the argument that such is the essence of athletic competition. But as soon as a team starts deriving that kind of unreasonable confidence less from itself and more from a third party--say, for example, bandwagon fans who were barely aware that the team existed before 2001--it has reserved itself a front row seat at its own Comeuppance Circus.

Think I'm overstating the matter? I suggest you familiarize yourself with the tale of the mentally disabled quarterback who earned a Super Bowl ring on the back of the Patriots' hubris.

Given that I am deeply familiar with the vitriolic hatred that fans of professional sports teams outside the Boston area have felt, with increasing dedication, toward fans of Boston-area-based professional sports teams ever since the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, I understand that most "Patraters" would be eager to view my apparent indifference as a surefire indication of a fair-weather fan. As it happens, those are people who had never given a second thought to Patriots fans prior to 2001...and that actually would make them, in a sense, "fair-weather haters".

I ask you this, fair-weather Patraters: Did you hate the Patriots fans back when Steve Grogan was running the offense on the field in Foxborough Stadium? No...you didn't. Because, not only have you never heard of Steve Grogan, you don't even know what Foxborough (also incorrectly spelled as "Foxboro") Stadium is. Mosi Tatupu--whom you've also never heard of--will gladly see you out the door.

At ten o'clock a.m. (PST) on Sunday, I will be seated front and center before my television set, surrounded by friends loved ones--all of them tried and true fans of the NFL team from Foxborough ("Foxboro" to the poseurs)--and I will be rooting for my New England Patriots with every last ounce of my sportsfan soul.

And if they don't lose to the Chiefs, which they probably won't, I'll be rooting for them to lose the next game...and, perhaps, the one after that.

I will do this because I truly love my Patriots, and I therefore realize that their media-drowned quest for a "perfect" season last year--and the ridiculous, jinx-tastic pressure that came with it--was what kept them from achieving a championship season.

Any NFL fan who would rather see his team have a perfect regular season (which, for the record, the Patriots did last year) than win the Super Bowl is the absolute antithesis of a genuine fan.

Which would mean that he's a New York Giants fan.

Which would mean that he's all about the Jets, now, because they have Brett Favre.

In either case, he calls himself a "New York" fan while rooting for a team that plays in New Jersey...which makes him a sad, sad shell of a person.

'Twas a Big Weekend for the Overrated Spawn of Failures

If Miley Cyrus is to Billy Ray Cyrus what Peyton Manning is to Archie Manning, Hannah Montana's surprising success during a weekend shared by an absolutely incomprehensible victory on the part of the least Manning leads a person to wonder if there isn't a half-formed goblin child currently chained to a radiator pipe in the basement of the Cyrus home who at this time next year will be starring in the #1 movie in the country.

Super Bowl XLII Replaced With Faulty Tecmo Bowl Cartridge

The more times Tom Brady got sacked yesterday--courtesy of an offensive line that appeared to be made of ectoplasm--or threw passes that vanished into thin air, the more suspicious I became.

But it wasn't until the fourth quarter, when flailing nincompoop Eli Manning closed his eyes and hurled his umpteenth hopeless prayer of the game and the ball ended up magically stuck to the side of David Tyree's helmet, did I know for certain that the world was witnessing a complete work of fiction.

It was a bold choice on the part of the NFL, and it certainly paid off for Fox in television ratings. However, since the Patriots had worked so hard to stay undefeated through the season, it might have been nice if the league had given them a chance to play in the Super Bowl instead of replacing them with digitally-rendered suckbots.

A Super Bowl Olive Branch

So much has already been said in anticipation of today's historic contest that I am uncharacteristically compelled to refrain from throwing my own thoughts on the pile.

Instead, I will take the high road, and hope only that the Patriots will make Eli Manning violently suffer for his brother's staggeringly undeserved Super Bowl victory last year, regardless of the facts that (1) he had nothing to do with that outcome and (2) he's functionally retarded.

May the best team* win!


[*As long as it isn't the New York Giants, because they're not good.]