It Was Duane Starks Fault
Willie McGinest bravely places the guilt of last year's Patriots' shortcomings at the appropriate feet.
Willie McGinest takes no guff. There ain't no target high enough that Willie McGinest won't tear down.
But seriously, this is just the latest evidence of the major psychological issues that are going on inside the heads of these players. Long ago they got tired of all the praise of genius coach Bill Belichick, and all the insinuations therein. Namely, that the players were so pedestrian as to require Bill Belichick's "Magnum Opus" defense to raise them to the promised land, not to mention a certain QB (two-time Super Bowl MVP and another time made one of his receivers Super Bowl MVP if you didn't remember).
We're are now going to radically switch gears to one Freddie Mitchell and the really lame and misinterpreted "diss" that began the whole Super Bowl controversy surrounding him. It began with a live interview on Sportscenter which I was lucky enough to view live. Mitchell simply didn't know the names of the Patriots starting cornerbacks. He knew their numbers, he talked about their tendencies, he knew them as football players, that much was obvious.
After the interview I didn't think much of it. Looking back at it I should have realized that Dan Patrick knew he found gold, feigning shock that Mitchell wouldn't know their names. Nevermind that these guys would be practice squad fodder if not for the torrent of injuries befalling the secondary. Nevermind that things were so bad that Troy Brown was their nickelback.
The Patriots went nuts, playing their fraudulent "disrespect" card yet again. T.O. Jr. went on to dig the hole much deeper that everyone forgot the anemic "insult" that caused the whole thing. Everyone just saw Rodney Harrison on TV acting like he was cutting a promo in the WWF in the 80s and it was assumed that what was said was something of substance. But it was not. the Patriots played the disrespect card in the face of 99% of football commentators picking the Patriots to win.
There is clearly some sort of mental illness running rampant through the New England locker room.
It took a while for their constant disrespected requiems to get on the nerves of the country as a whole, but last season that finally happened.
Which makes this season and the future so interesting? The nucleus of the defense has been almost totally dismantled. A few important pieces remain, one of which is recovered from a stroke. But what will happen to the Patriots?
Do they continue to dominate, win another Super Bowl or two, and in the process pretty much prove that pretty much, yes, it was all Maestro Bill and The Golden Boy? All the while with a couple of the old disrespect brigade along for the ride?
Or do they fall back to earth, and prove the point that it was a special group of players?
I always thought that the players on that team, especially the defense, didn't get all the credit they deserved and Belichick too much, at least for a while. And then they beat the Panthers, and got all the credit in the world. Then they beat the Eagles, and were compared to some of the greatest teams of all time. They were getting enough credit for a long time.
That was a long convoluted trail starting with an innocuous article. But it is understandable that someone with this kind of dementia would seek to extricate himself from the tepid criticism a 10-6 season with a playoff win would bring.
[Last year] We had injuries. You had [Richard] Seymour hurt early and Rodney Harrison was out. Those are some of our core guys, and some of the [replacements] coming in were terrible. Duane Starks, he came in and played like trash. He was terrible. You had other guys coming in that couldn't fill the shoes of some of those guys that had been there for years and [were] your core guys.
Willie McGinest takes no guff. There ain't no target high enough that Willie McGinest won't tear down.
But seriously, this is just the latest evidence of the major psychological issues that are going on inside the heads of these players. Long ago they got tired of all the praise of genius coach Bill Belichick, and all the insinuations therein. Namely, that the players were so pedestrian as to require Bill Belichick's "Magnum Opus" defense to raise them to the promised land, not to mention a certain QB (two-time Super Bowl MVP and another time made one of his receivers Super Bowl MVP if you didn't remember).
We're are now going to radically switch gears to one Freddie Mitchell and the really lame and misinterpreted "diss" that began the whole Super Bowl controversy surrounding him. It began with a live interview on Sportscenter which I was lucky enough to view live. Mitchell simply didn't know the names of the Patriots starting cornerbacks. He knew their numbers, he talked about their tendencies, he knew them as football players, that much was obvious.
After the interview I didn't think much of it. Looking back at it I should have realized that Dan Patrick knew he found gold, feigning shock that Mitchell wouldn't know their names. Nevermind that these guys would be practice squad fodder if not for the torrent of injuries befalling the secondary. Nevermind that things were so bad that Troy Brown was their nickelback.
The Patriots went nuts, playing their fraudulent "disrespect" card yet again. T.O. Jr. went on to dig the hole much deeper that everyone forgot the anemic "insult" that caused the whole thing. Everyone just saw Rodney Harrison on TV acting like he was cutting a promo in the WWF in the 80s and it was assumed that what was said was something of substance. But it was not. the Patriots played the disrespect card in the face of 99% of football commentators picking the Patriots to win.
There is clearly some sort of mental illness running rampant through the New England locker room.
It took a while for their constant disrespected requiems to get on the nerves of the country as a whole, but last season that finally happened.
Which makes this season and the future so interesting? The nucleus of the defense has been almost totally dismantled. A few important pieces remain, one of which is recovered from a stroke. But what will happen to the Patriots?
Do they continue to dominate, win another Super Bowl or two, and in the process pretty much prove that pretty much, yes, it was all Maestro Bill and The Golden Boy? All the while with a couple of the old disrespect brigade along for the ride?
Or do they fall back to earth, and prove the point that it was a special group of players?
I always thought that the players on that team, especially the defense, didn't get all the credit they deserved and Belichick too much, at least for a while. And then they beat the Panthers, and got all the credit in the world. Then they beat the Eagles, and were compared to some of the greatest teams of all time. They were getting enough credit for a long time.
That was a long convoluted trail starting with an innocuous article. But it is understandable that someone with this kind of dementia would seek to extricate himself from the tepid criticism a 10-6 season with a playoff win would bring.
posted by Hbox at 2:32 PM
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