On "Class"

There has been a lot of blather about "class" and "running up the score" this season. I'll not go on about the 04 Colts, the 98 Vikings, or the fact that a few minutes less of Brady playing might slightly decrease his chance of injury.I'll just go right to the "class" issue.

In the first couple of weeks of this season, the New England Patriots were branded "cheaters" by the pundits, based on Cameragate. This was fine. There was a rule. The Pats broke it. I personally say, hell, if that's not cheating, all we have is a definitional argument. Fines paid, draft pick confiscated.

Asterisks, for those who believed the Camera to be the Key, applied.

There was no disproving any allegation, any assumption. So the fact that you couldn't prove the assumption either, wasn't important.

Hence, we saw Runo Mahe, Donovan McNabb, Jerome Bettis, and others, either saying outright they had "won" games they knew they had lost, or strongly implying it. Everybody we'd beaten for years suddenly came out of the woodwork with the Mother Of All Excuses: we didn't lose because we sucked, we lost because of the CAMERA! Give us our rings!

Well, gentlemen, this terrible, thuggish, loutish, ungentlemanly, inconsiderate point-scoring behavior in 2007, might be interpreted as your proof.

To coin a phrase, we are what you thought we were (until you started with the excuses.)

And the 2007 New England Patriots are leaving no doubt as to whether or not the game was the result of a camera.

Did any Redskins finger the Pats as "big fat cheaters?" No? Tough. They are, then, the victims of their own ineptitude combined with the rest of the league's ill-advised choice of impugning our teams' play over the last six years, based on an infraction that has been proven to be of middling importance at best.

Hate us, hate us, hate us. Revel in it. Embrace your hate. Drink the hateraid, take a vacation on Cape Hate-er-ass. Better hate than never. Hate-of-the-art... knock yourself out. It keeps feeding us....because the 2007 Pats know, and are not forgetting, that the NFL wallowed in their "righteous" disrespect for everything the Pats have achieved through hard work and focus, which those other teams could not achieve. Was it "classy" to write off 6 years' of play, based on an unquantified suspicion?

Not an issue, if the assumptions were true, all around the country, made by players and fans alike. What if the Pats weren't that good?

Well, the rest of the league is learning the answer, game by painful game. The Pats were that good, and it was a grave, grave mistake to extrapolate from the infraction itself, to the kinds of conclusions they were drawing. Because now the Pats have to prove they're that good, all over again.

Know what? I don't think I ever heard Belichick talking about "class."

I have heard him say "it is what it is" dozens of times.

Belichick might be one individual more concerned with the truth -- the truth of what his guys accomplished -- than with bullshit ex-post-facto notions of what "class" means.

He'll never say that, of course, though the new arbiters of "class", from Lady Tom last season to the Redskins last week, will take any opportunity to repeat their allegations of "classlessness" -- oddly enough, after they lose games.

Know what else I've never heard? A team that won a game claiming the team that lost had no "class". It's always the other way around.

And I predict that this year, with very few exceptions if any, team after team will have occasion to pontificate about the relative level of "class" with which the Patriots destroyed them.

Thanks for telling us how we "should" have beat you, guys.

Deal with how we did.