This is my first ever football blog entry, so it will be longer than usual and I promise to keep them shorter in the future. I am not sure how many people will actually even see this but I talk football constantly and felt the need to put my opinion out there for a sense of keeping record. Basically, my sense is that in most fields analysts or critics, whatever they may be called in said industry all have a herd mentality. Let's take movies for instance. I enjoy watching movies. There as not as much opportunity to watch them since my son was born a few years ago, but I enjoy them nonetheless. I can pretty much tell you when somebody will be nominated for an award from the trailer (Christian Bale in the Fighter and Will Smith in Pursuit of Happyness). I base this on what I think social perception will be and what kind of role it is and that we as a society like to give credence to certain types of roles. This is getting far off track as the main point of this article and blog is to try and put out an opinion that is stripped of the herd mentality which many football analysts and pundits seem to be involved. Sometimes there will be agreement with them but many times I will give my opinion and hopefully it will turn out to be right more often than wrong.
I am a Boston native and I am a pretty neutral football fan as there has not been a true favorite team since Dan Snyder and Norv Turner took over my beloved Washington Redskins. The Patriots were not fed to me since my parents were not football fans so although I loved football I was left without a true team, which is tough since my wife is a season ticket holder and my oldest brother has had a mancrush on Tom Brady for quite some time. What happens with the Patriots is always quite comical as the media will always put them on this pedestal and the fans begin to think they are unbeatable. Then come the angry calls of how badly they played when they finally lose a game, especially when it is during the playoffs and at the hands of the Rival Jets. Although they did not play their best game, if it was any other team it would just be the Jets were the better team. We as fans get used the norm, even when it begins to seem unrealistic. Tom Brady is great at what he does but people can't expect him to be perfect week in and week out, it just doesn't happen. The offensive line had been playing incredibly and that couldn't hold up forever, and although it happened at the worst time these things tend to average out and thus you get a much worse game than normal at the most inopportune time (see Saints defense from week 1 of this years playoffs).
In 2007, I was of the lone opinion that the Patriots needed to lose a game so as not to feel invincible and if they had I feel they would have won the Super Bowl that year. We had an offense that nobody had seen from us and it took a while for teams to pick up what were doing. Go back and look at our offensive output and you could see it slowly sputtering towards the end. We think that they are professionals so they do not feed into what is being said about them. Even the great Bill Belichick can't keep them focused for every big game especially when it had been a while since losing at home and you beat this team 45-3 the last time at Gillette. The truth be told this year we don't have a ton of great talent but were a very good team which can be a recipe for a letdown.
This post has been running long so I am going to cut it at this point as I am just trying to give people a taste of what I will blog about. I will agree with the majority on occasion as I would never have thought that New Orleans could lose to a bad Seattle team in the first round of the playoffs, but I did know enough not to put money on that line. New Orleans will beat that same Seahawk team 99 out of 100 times but that still leaves as the Little Giants once said "one time".
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