Et tu, Belichick?

Friends, Romans, NFL fans, lend me your ears!
I come to bury the Patriots, not praise them.
The games that they win live after them;
the things they do to win those games are oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with the Patriots. The noble Belichick
hath told you that the Patriots are noble,
and Belichick is an honorable man....

Well. Well, well well. Well. Ahhhh...well.

This may be unseemly on my part, but...heck, I don't care. I've long made absolutely no secret how loathsome I find Bill Belichick and his whole merry band of cohorts in New England, and once again, they prove my point through arrogance and, now, unmasked misdeeds. I've always been flummoxed by the mystique surrounding Belichick (and Tom Brady), and now quite a lot of it is explained: it turns out that Belichick's greatness is at least in part a function of the fact that the guy's just a weasel.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious, doesn't it, how Belichick's managed to carve out his reputation as a guy who can somehow elevate the most marginal of players into terrific performers.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how all of those players who thrive under Belichick fail to thrive when they go someplace else.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how Belichick's former assistants go on to their own coaching jobs and end up not doing quite as well.

It suddenly seems a lot less mysterious how it is that the Patriots always struggle against the Bills in their first meeting of the season, and then blow them out in the second.

And it suddenly seems a lot less mysterious just how it is that New England always seems to just happen to have the exact right play drawn up in every situation.

I'll admit it: I'm happy this came out. I like that the hallowed New England mystique has taken a major hit. I like that people are now seeing that franchise more the way I've seen them for years (pretty much ever since that incredibly phony stunt of theirs at the outset of Super Bowl XXXVI, when they eschewed individual player introductions in favor of "being introduced as a team"). For a number of years now, questioning the Anointed status of Belichick, Brady, and the Patriots has been the NFL equivalent of walking into a Catholic church during Mass and denouncing the Pope with a bullhorn.

Well, it now seems clear to a lot more people that the halo on the New England organization is actually a brass hoop held up by a bit of coathanger.

What to do, then? I personally would like to see the Patriots stripped of their first and second round draft picks next year, as well as have the league invalidate any trades they might make to acquire new picks in those rounds. And then I'd require Belichick to wear a three-piece suit on the field during all game days. That ought to hurt 'em!

(OK, gloating's over. Back to the more reasoned tones you've all come to expect here!)

UPDATE: Belicheater.com. I love it. A taste:

Only Belichick’s lack of throwing furniture and his omnipresent monotone keeps his reputation from completely spilling over into Bob Knight territory. He’s a jerk, but not one you hear screaming a lot. Belichick might not completely disdain the comparison to Knight, a good friend of Belichick’s former boss, Parcells. Knight was never one to rush to apologize for his actions, and Belichick doesn’t openly, Nixon-style, declare “I am not a jerk,” instead issuing vague responses that sound like they were written by Alan Greenspan.

But one other thing about Knight. For all of his flaws, he was all about fair play. Belichick is about gaming the system as much as you can.

That's from this article by Bob Cook, reprinted at Belicheater.com.

I wonder how long this has been going on. This seems, frankly, worse to me than Barry Bonds's steroid use; this potentially could put an asterisk next to the results of three Super Bowls. Ouch.