Can you Feel the Hate?

After about week 3 I started thinking about whether the Patriots might actually be trying to run up the score because until that time it was still difficult to tell. Now that the 52-7 drubbing of the most recent "first team to test the Patriots" is over, we can say, yes Virginia, there is an evil god who lords over all that is football. He who laughs in the face of karma (at least 4 columns mentioning how karma is going to come back to hurt the Patriots, up from last week's high of 2).

One of those people mentioning karma was Mike Ditka (though to be fair he wouldn't actually recognize the word and instead used the sage philosophical proverb "what comes around..sometimes goes around"). Perhaps the former coach of the former greatest team ever doesn't recall Superbowl XX, a 46-10 shellacking of the Patriots. The game was over by half time. I don't remember Jim McMahon sitting out the fourth quarter as evil demi-god Tom Brady is expected to do every week.

Now, although the columns calling for the banishment of the Patriots and sending Bill Belichick to the ninth circle of hell will far outway any positive commentary about yesterday's game, we're starting to see a little bit of a change in the righteous attitude coming in the columns on the subject as more and more media members seem to be (almost but not quite) defending the Patriots running up the score (see John Clayton's column - link to the left).

Personally I'm hoping they reset their moral compasses and get back to the nastiness of the previous weeks. Fortunately, tomorrow's TMQB column on ESPN.com is all but a lock to continue the crusade against the heathen Patriots.

And if you're a columnist out there looking for a slightly different angle to kill the Patriots on, well the Redskins' headsets weren't working for part of the game yesterday. And so the season of evil continues unabated...