Cheaters Never Prosper

If football gods exist out there, they’re surely smiling today. The New York Giants, a team no one believed in, beat the New England Patriots yesterday in the Super Bowl by a score of 17-14. A boring game for three quarters, this one will go down in history as one of the best ever.

It will also be remembered as the day when the brash braggarts, the cocky prima donnas, the princes of the NFL, got their come uppance. If revenge is best served cold, yesterday was a chiller. Bill Belichick and his group of elite athletes were outplayed and overmatched. The king is dead. The dream is over.

New England will not be talked about in the same breath as the San Francisco 49ers, Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys, great NFL dynasties all. The Patriots came off like big-headed trash talkers and the Giants left us with a happy, warm feeling. It was a karmatic snap-back of the highest magnitude. It was sweeter than candy and more fitting than a good pair of shoes. Okay, enough with the corny adjectives.

Things couldn’t have gone worse for the Pats. The day before the game, The Boston Globe published a report that New England cheated again back in 2002, when they videotaped the St. Louis Rams’ final practice prior to the Super Bowl. If you don’t know, a walk through is where a team goes through all of the plays and formations that they plan to run in an upcoming game.

If indeed the Patriots taped that practice and used the information they gleaned from watching it, they would have had an undeniable advantage. It would be like knowing the end of a movie or the punch line to a joke. As it was, New England beat the Rams in that Super Bowl, even though St. Louis was heavily favored.

Although Patriots’ officials vehemently deny the charges, the whole thing stinks. It also tends to ring true, since we already know for a fact that the team is not above cheating and videotaping is their preferred method. The most ironic part of it all is that The Boston Globe broke the story – New England’s hometown newspaper. Maybe they’re as sick of Belichick as everyone else is.

Then, there was the cocky attitude of the Patriots before, during and after the game. You would think that a team with their record of dominance would be a little humble. Not these clowns. They were talking smack the week before, throughout the game and afterwards during the post-game press conference. Tom Brady made a snarky comment before the game during a press conference, when he implied that the Patriots would score a bunch of points against New York’s defense. Rodney Harrison dissed them, and then Randy Moss made some disparaging remarks about the Giants’ secondary – a secondary that had just shut him down.

And then the capper had to be when Bill Belichick left the field early at the end of the game. That really showed a complete lack of class. If a player did that, he’d be fined and possibly suspended. The bottom line is that Bill Belichick thinks he’s above it all. He could care less what anyone thinks. Belichick is the epitome of a selfish, egocentric bore – the man has shown that he’ll cheat to win and then when he loses, he acts like a four-year-old.

And that’s why the whole affair was wonderful to watch. It was the choke job of the decade, if not the century and a pleasure to experience from beginning to end. At least that’s my take on it. I guess if you’re a Patriots’ fan you’d probably see it a little differently.