Bryan Joiner

I love shades of grey. My favorite Beatles song is “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a song with no structure that spirals out into infinity. One of my favorite novels is Infinite Jest, which builds for 1,000 pages and ends without a real conclusion. I thought the Sopranos finale ended perfectly. I like it when you draw conclusions based on evidence instead of finding your evidence in light of the conclusion.

Football does not lend itself to shades of grey. The outcome is the outcome, and 60 minutes is usually enough to tell you which team is better. The final score tells you enough. That’s not true with the Colts and Patriots. When Boomer Esiason said he wanted to see the teams play a 7-game series, I was all for it. They may play again, but even one game is not enough for me. The Patriots won Sunday and I was happy, but I was astonished that they won. Some probably see this as validation of the Patriots’ greatness, and it is, but I think they see it for the wrong reasons: they believe the Patriots are definitively better than Indianapolis. They are not. But they are good enough to win a sloppy game which, in football, is often good enough. John Madden might say that sloppy games are what football is all about, and there’s something to the art of winning when you’re not at your best, but that game was a coin flip from the beginning.

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During the Patriots-Redskins blowout, I texted a high-minded sports fan friend of mine and asked, “Can football be exquisite? The Patriots play exquisite football.” I’ve thought about it a bit since then, and football can be exquisite, but it’s extremely difficult. The Patriots, on a normal day, play an exceptional brand of football hitherto unseen with these eyes, but get a little pressure on Brady and it becomes just another game with great players in Flying Elvis jerseys. That’s what Sunday’s game was. The difference between the teams was not exquisite or even subtle: it was a 6’4″ wide receiver from Marshall named Randy Moss. For all the pre-game talk about how the teams could beat each other, in the end it was so simple, a caveman could have told you. Randy Moss was the difference. He caught almost everything thrown near him, and became Brady’s number one game plan when the game was in doubt: the QB looked for him on six straight plays. This was a strategy that is absolutely new to the Patriots. Brady won three Super Bowls that way and led the team to an 8-0 start this year by finding the open receiver, but against the best pass defense in the league, and maybe the fastest defense of all-time, he could only rely on Moss receiver to get him out of there. Play after play, he looked for Moss, and the sequence is a testament both to the Patriots front office (for heisting Moss from the Raiders) and the Colts defense (which shut down literally everybody else). At some point, it became akin to that ever-so-slight difference between, say, a baseball pitcher and a hitter, and why a great pitcher will always have the advantage over a great hitter (see Carmona vs. A-Rod, 2007 ALDS): the pitcher, like the quarterback, is acting, while the hitter and the defense are reacting. That slight, slight difference is the basis for all football offense and baseball’s phenomenal rate of failure at the plate. In the Patriots game, Brady and Moss, two of the best players to ever play their positions, were able to exploit that difference to give them the slightest advantage over a phenomenal defense that had shut down everyone else.

The irony here is that the teams have switched roles fairly convincingly. In this head-to-head meeting, the Patriots have to lean heavily on offensive skill over scheme, whereas the Colts defense relies on schemes to disrupt Brady instead of trying to brute-force their way to the QB. Flip the script, and that was the Pats/Colts playbook of 2003 and 2004. The difference is that Peyton Manning can no longer be schemed, so the Pats must rely on a brute force defense, and the Patriots can’t run the ball down Indy’s proverbial throat anymore.

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So can football be “exquisite?” It can be, but usually only in dominance. The Patriots have looked great because they’ve executed flawlessly. It’s wonderful to see plays executed so nice. But it’s hard for football to be “exquisite” in a close game. It’s dramatic, exhilarating and brutal, but it’s usually not exquisite. Baseball is the opposite. Its nail-biting games are also the most beautiful, whereas the blowouts are brutal.

Add to that baseball’s tendency to even itself out, and you see the beauty. If you have the same teams play each other 100 times, both teams will win a goodly number of games even if they’re the Yankees and the Royals. Football’s the opposite. It trends toward demolition. Play 20 games between two teams and they might split a few, but eventually one team will dominate. You can usually tell which team this is by the first game, and that’s why real upsets in football are rare (the ’96 Jaguars over the Broncos, the Cardinals over anybody) and everyone is happy with the one-game-and-out playoff system. I won’t be happy with it this year. The Colts and Patriots are both fielding their best team of the decade in the decade they have defined. Once is certainly not enough, and twice is barely sufficient. This entire season has the same feel as MLB’s did in 2004; then, we were killing time for a Red Sox/Yankees rematch after the 2003 heartbreak, here we’re playing out the string for Colts/Pats 2 after the AFC Championship Game debacle. Who’s actually better? We may find out in January. We may not.

This would be one of the “other stuff” posts mentioned above, but it’s hard to escape the Patriots/Colts game, even for someone who doesn’t have cable television. For what it’s worth, Gregg Easterbrook semi-retracted his Good Vs. Evil analogy from last week, but I’m as convinced by it as he is convinced by the Patriots’ contention that they are done taping their opponents. He tries to explain his column away as satire, but the best satire works because it exposes greater truths, and his failure to do that convincingly is more than his “failure as a writer” to get his ideas across. It’s his failure as a thinker. To wit, he tries to flip the situation on its head, boasting that no one called him to task when he called Belichick “perhaps the best coach ever,” thus attempting to show… well, that his audience is a bunch of Patriots fans, I guess. And again, he underestimates his audience’s intelligence. Even the most anti-Patriots fans out there — and we’ll get to them in a second — would likely agree that Bill Belichick is a great football coach. Hell, Easterbrook even thinks so. The section starts, “No one draws up a better game plan than Belichick.” So he is essentially goading his wide-ranging audience for not taking him to task for what is, at this point, an axiomatic statement – that Belichick may be the best coach ever – but FOR taking him to task for what he admits was his “failing as a writer.” He’s calling out his audience for being discerning in their criticism. To be a failure as a writer is one thing, but to attempt to explain it away, and fail, is a failure as a thinker.

That said, the Patriots were cast once again into the role of villain this week, after their shellacking of the Washington Redskins, with a large number of media members taking the Patriots to task for “running up the score.” And here’s where it gets tough for me to defend the Patriots, because I’m a Patriots fan, and it’s tough to take me seriously. But I think the facts are firmly on my side. The only people to vocally complain about the score are two Washington Redskins linebackers and a host of media personalities. Both Washington coach Joe Gibbs and Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy said nothing ill of it, with Dungy saying something to the effect of, “You never know what a team is working on.” Which gets to another point: should we be angrier at the Patriots for “disrespecting the game” by playing it well, or at the Redskins for playing it so poorly, giving up a 4th-and-20 to a backup quarterback? Or, as I read elsewhere, “Why should the Patriots give up just because the Redskins did?” And for all you Easterbrooks out there who claim that Peyton Manning was removed way before Tom Brady was in last week’s game, if you refer to that little thing with the numbers in the corner of the screen — it’s called the clock — you’ll see that they were pulled at the same point in the game, halfway through the fourth quarter. To ask that infamous prehistoric question: Next time, why don’t you do a little research?

Which brings us, belatedly, to the precipice of Sunday’s game. I was reading an Indianapolis Colts blog this morning, 18to88.blogspot.com, and I was impressed with the output of material, and unsurprised by its vehement anti-Patriots tone. The author reiterates all the “The Colts are classy, and the Patriots are not” maxims as they relate to the game. But here’s my bigger question: what would happen if the roles were reversed? Sports fans (this one included), especially football fans, view their franchise identities’ as deterministic when things are going well, and use their success to hammer other methods of doing things. Colts fans believe the Colts are great not just because of their record, but because of the way they operate. But do they really care? I doubt it. If you swapped the franchises tomorrow, Colts fans would tell Patriots to focus on the game results, and Patriots fans would call the Colts classless. That’s why I don’t put much stock in what anyone says about the Patriots, and vice versa. The game’s the thing, and all the rest is just noise. It’s also why I believe that I’m right to defend the Patriots here, regardless of my rooting interests. As much as I dislike the Yankees for fun, I’ve never complained about their profligate spending, not because my team spends a lot of money but because any team that’s not spending money is choosing not to spend it. The rules are the rules. The Patriots’ are supposedly breaking the “unwritten rules” of football by using the Redskins as a tune-up for the Colts; I would argue that the Redskins are disrespecting the game by playing it so poorly more than the Patriots are disrespecting it by playing it well. Similarly, if the Yankees were beating up on the Royals in a meaningless August game, would I complain if Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu, and the ghost of A-Rod stayed in the game, pounding hit after hit? Absolutely not, especially if they had a series with the Red Sox on deck. This analogy doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough, especially if you imagine the Royals series as a playoff series. Why the playoffs? Because the Patriots/Colts game is a playoff game. If they meet again, the winner of this one will almost certainly have home field advantage, and in this case that advantage is huge. For all the bluster about the Pats’ lack of sportsmanship last week, all anyone will be talking about Monday is the game, and that’s all anyone really should be talking about.

(The following is a letter I wrote to ESPN.com ombudswoman Le Anne Schreiber after reading this week’s TMQ column by Gregg Easterbrook; while the letter has, at second glance, some factual errors, they are trivial compared to Easterbrook’s unbelievable intellectual dishonesty. It’s not that I’m upset that someone would classify the Colts/Patriots game as good vs. evil — frankly, I don’t care — but Easterbrook’s ad hominem attacks against the team represent unbelievably bad journalism. I really only started reading him this year after the scandal of years past, and I quickly got bored of his long-winded columns, until he started using almost entirely anecdotal evidence to rip on the Patriots. Yes, I own a Tom Brady jersey, but no, I would have no problem turning on Belichick et al. if they turned out to have done something wrong for which they have not been punished. Easterbrook has turned his suspicions that the Patriots did more wrong than has been suggested and has twisted them into facts, and it’s embarrassing to him and espn.com. He may yet produce facts, but he’s undermining his intellectual integrity in the meantime on a weekly basis. This week, I couldn’t stand it anymore. This letter was copied to him.)

Dear Ms. Schreiber,

First off, I would like to say that I love your column. As a longtime reader of espn.com, there are many things I love about the site but also a great many things I do not like; yours is the first voice from the inside that has resonated with my own on the issue, and needless to say you’ve done it with a breadth and depth unprecedented among level-headed ESPN skeptics.

I say “level-headed” because, on espn.com and elsewhere, there’s a constant reductionism going on: people either love ESPN or hate it; they love the Yankees or Patriots, or hate them; they love Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, and the other is scary and dangerous. Such thinking itself is dangerous, if commonplace, and it’s the reason I’m writing you instead of Gregg Easterbrook with respect to his most recent column about the Patriots (and, frankly, all of those from the past month): I feel that, by virtue of being born in Boston, Mr. Easterbrook would dismiss my challenges to his outlandishly irresponsible and reductive journalism.

Mr. Easterbrook’s latest column weighs the purported “evil” values of the Patriots versus the “good” values of the Indianapolis Colts, judging that a Colts victory on November 4th bodes well for the future of the league, while a Patriots victory portends doom for the NFL. It’s rare you see such a striking example of irresponsible reductionist thought from someone of the purported intelligence of Mr. Easterbrook, but it is becoming commonplace with him. He dismisses the Patriots’ organization — all of the 55 players on the team, plus the coaches and administration — as “evil” based on the attitude of its head coach, the “smirk” of its star quarterback, an admittedly embarrassing scandal for which it has been punished, and its tendency to “run up the score.” The Colts are “good” because of the public persona and level-headedness of their coach, the vocation of their quarterback’s wife, and the fact that the team’s players do not complain about playing in Indianapolis. Based largely on these six factors, Easterbrook indicts one entire team and lauds another. By reducing each team to a simple thought — I like this about one team, and dislike this about another — he exhibits the sort of intellectual blindness one would expect from the most provincial fan instead of the observations of a supposedly impartial observer. He creates a narrative based on his feelings, instead of creating a document based on football observations: only one of the above sentiments — running up the score — has to do with actual game-play, and if Mr. Easterbrook was to do the most cursory research he would find that virtually every player or coach asked about the Patriots’ bloated scoring tendencies has said that it is within their right to do as they please. No one has complained, but Mr. Easterbrook has been personally aggrieved enough to conflate a single coach’s decision to score an extra touchdown with a franchise-wide ethos of evil.

The main problem here is that Mr. Easterbrook, for all his academic credentials, does not respect the intelligence of his audience. I would argue that the majority of espn.com’s readers recognize that the NFL, based on several business models, has a different value structure as that of a Pop Warner football game, where the rules and mores therein are important not only as facets of the game but as teaching tools for later in life. This distinction seems to be obvious, but Mr. Easterbrook conflates the two as if they are the same in the service of his argument, and expects his audience to follow as he uses this as a backbone for an equally simplistic and child-like argument: this group of guys is good, and this one is bad. Not only is Mr. Easterbrook’s argument reductive and pourous, it’s not even convincing. It presents no new evidence about the Patriots’s cheating scandal (which you had suggested he provide before another broadside), and claims a Patriots Super Bowl victory would tarnish the NFL, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that all the fans care about is the game: the 2002 Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl amid the Ray Lewis scandal — one with far worse real-life consequences than anything the Patriots have done within the confines of the football field — and it is almost never mentioned on ESPN’s networks or on espn.com. Last year’s Cincinnati Bengals were beset by 10 arrests; this year, the only talk about their team is about their struggles on the field. The game’s the thing, but Mr. Easterbrook cannot see the game for his likely copious game-day notes. He’s a fan masquerading as a journalist, and is as heavy-handed on the pro-Colts side as a Bill Simmons column is on the pro-Patriots side. The difference, of course, is that Simmons’s columns are presented as entertainment, and Simmons makes his allegiances clear. Mr. Easterbrook presents his columns as serious football analysis, when in fact his personal opinions have become the driving force of his Colts/Patriots analysis and thus his irresponsible lede. It’s damaging to the reader, it’s damaging to espn.com and it’s damaging to ESPN as a whole to regularly print treatises that would be eviscerated in high school English class for lack of evidence.

Finally, there is the issue of Mr. Easterbrook’s previous firing from espn.com. The issue was unpleasant enough that I do not care to bring the up the specifics again, but between his previous (admitted) carelessness and his current factually-unfounded demagoguery, it would serve ESPN greatly to dismiss him permanently. ESPN would be better served by a football column that stuck to the facts.

Bryan Joiner
Astoria, NY

This has not been the best week to be a Patriots fan — but let’s face it, it’s far from the worst. I’ll take a winning team with a “cheating” coach over a 1-15 team with Rod Rust at the helm. That really stinks, and as Tim Curry said in Clue: “I know because I was there.”

What surprises me about all this, as usual, is the notion that sports represent a “gentlemanly competition” where the rules, not the outcome of the games, are paramount. For all the talk of Bill Belichick’s reputation taking “hits,” let’s ask: For what reason did we celebrate Belichick before this incident? He’s always been secretive and obnoxious figure, and now it seems everyone “knew” he went to great and possibly rule-breaking lengths to obtain information. League MVP LaDanian Tomlinson said the Patriots’ motto should be, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” That’s pretty clever. But you have to be far more clever to actually win football games.

Here’s the thing: the Patriots won three Super Bowls by winning football games — the “model franchise” tag was applied to them by the same sportswriters who are now tearing down the castle. Remember Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa? Rick Ankiel? Kirby Puckett? O.J.? Kobe? I do. And at some point, I realized that sports are just games, which is, for an otherwise rational adult, a long overdue realization. I actually called a friend of mine yesterday, a huge Barry Bonds apologist, and said I finally realized how he felt. Long enamored of the indisputable parts of Bonds’ greatness, he’s dealt with a lot of crap from those who cannot accept that Bonds is exceptional only because of his talent. There are similarities between Belichick and Bonds. Once there was evidence that these geniuses (and they both possess genius-level skill) had circumvented the rules, sportswriters let their collective wrath upon them, choosing to virtually ignore countless — literally countless — of other, similar incidents. The story pattern is binary: hero/villain, cheater/non-cheater. In real life, it’s not like that at all, and I can’t put it better than it is put in Zero Effect: “There are no evil guys; there are no innocent guys. There are just a bunch of guys.”

It has been hard for me, in the last few years, to summon team-specific sports love. More often, I am goaded into it. I admire Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning as much as I admire David Ortiz and Tom Brady. I am more enamored with skill and technique than, as Jerry Seinfeld put it, “laundry.” I admire greatness: I’m looking for who stands out, on the field, from the big bunch of guys in each league. When the Patriots lost to the Colts last year, instead of being crushed, I was proud of the team, short on skill, that maintained a near championship-level of play for 60 minutes on football’s biggest stage. It was a successful season.

On Sunday, a bunch of guys wearing Patriots uniforms will play a bunch of guys wearing Chargers uniforms. One of the guys on the Patriots fathered a child out of wedlock with a supermodel (despite his Catholic upbringing), and his coach will be three days removed from the largest fine in NFL history. Two of the guys in Chargers uniforms will be one year removed from steroid abuse suspensions. One of them stars in a brand-new, state-of-the-art Nike commercial. Find a hero and a villain if you must, but you won’t find that in the official record of the game, of which there is only one:

The box score.

Blowing up all over the Internets.