Despite a rather lackluster first half, what we euphemistically call a "defensive struggle", the Super Bowl turned out to be a pretty decent game, as with most of the recent ones. At least the Eagles unexpectedly covered the spread. Good thing I didn't bet on the game.
So the New England Patriots are the first sports dynasty of this still relatively new century/millennium. And to think it all turned on a bizarre moment, a fumble in the snow that was amazingly ruled not a fumble, at midnight in a frigid, snowy Foxboro Stadium. That playoff game against the Oakland Raiders -- indeed, that play at the end of the fourth quarter in which Charles Woodson knocked the ball out of Tom Brady's hand and fell on it, thereby sealing the Patriots' loss -- could just as easily have been the end of a rather middling team that got close, but not quite close enough. Teams that lose divisional playoff games tend to regroup somewhat in the off-season, restructuring nearly as much as if they hadn't made the playoffs at all.
Instead, after the infamous "Tuck Rule" (a rule which I had never heard of in 25+ years of watching football, and only have seen a time or two since, almost as if to legitimize its use in that playoff game) was invoked, the Pats were still considered underdogs going into Pittsburgh for the AFC Conference Championship Game. To their credit, they regrouped and whipped the Steelers handily in that one, which the over-achieving Raiders would likely have not managed to do. (I say this as an unfortunately die-hard Raiders fan.) They then went in and beat a declining, but still superior, Rams team in Super Bowl XXXVI. And thus was born a system which has now grown into a bona-fide dynasty.
But as we've discussed before, the system is an unusual one, a bit of a throwback. New England has many excellent players, but no true superstars. They were ravaged by injuries throughout the season, especially in the defensive secondary. They were using a wide receiver as a nickelback, and only one starting DB, 12-year veteran Rodney Harrison, made it through the entire season and post-season. This is proof positive of a smart, successful system -- it doesn't matter who you plug into it, it still works the way it's supposed to.
Andy Reid operates a similarly successful system in Philadelphia. This was particularly evident a couple seasons ago, when Donovan McNabb broke his ankle and was sidelined for most of the season. Koy Detmer and, after Detmer was also injured, A.J. Feeley, stepped in and the Eagles scarcely missed a beat. Both QBs have gone on to other teams, where they have been shown to be largely ordinary. The system enabled them to excel, to the overall benefit of the team.
This, as we discussed, is the true strength of a system, in any walk of life. It is not to enable one person to gain 20,000 yards, or one person to make $20 billion. Trickle-down theory aside, the vast majority of the benefit accrues to that one person, and if that person happens to be more concerned with self-promotion than well-being, the team loses even as it is put in the position of promoting the one person's success, hoping to maybe catch some ancillary benefit somewhere along the line.
This is not communism, it is common sense. Look at other major sports leagues. The NBA has become a joke, hinging as it was on Michael Jordan's statistics and endless self-promotion. Major League Baseball is even worse; small-market teams don't have a chance against Steinbrenner's annual $200 million juggernaut. And who the hell pays Alex Rodriguez $25 million per year to play third base? Even the highest football salaries aren't half that, and every one of those guys takes dozens of monster hits every single game.
So here's to systems begetting dynasties. Enjoy it while it lasts. Offensive coordinator Charlie Weis is off to resurrect Notre Dame's football program. Defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel is en route to coach the Cleveland Browns, who ironically ran Bill Belichick out of town a decade ago, when he was universally derided as a moron with the personality of a shit sandwich. Now Belichick's introverted personality is seen as a manifestation of his obvious football genius. He is clearly a very smart guy, and seems fundamentally decent. Winning is a great disinfectant. We'll see if he can keep it up without his fellow geniuses, Weis and Crennel.
This is a pretty interesting profile of Belichick, worth a quick read.
So the Bushes are now apparently the first political dynasty of this new century/millennium. And to think it all turned on a bizarre moment, a judicial punt of sorts, after a month of careening legal minutiae and many suited weasels speaking many arcane truths, half-truths, and untruths. Perhaps it was the Supreme Court's version of invoking the "Tuck Rule".
Whatever the misgivings of the policy aspects of the system (and call them legion, for they are many), there is a system in play, and a coach. That coach is Karl Rove, of course, and one could say that his defensive mastermind is one Richard B. Cheney. Rove is his own offensive coordinator, even calling plays to QB Bush's headset during the game at times.
Unlike Tom Brady or Donovan McNabb, Bush is not a student of the game film. He lets Rove and Cheney handle the wonk stuff; that is, after all, what coaches are for. Bush does have an instintive feel for how the game of political football is played, though. Much like Terry Bradshaw back in the '70s, he is content to let people think he's as thick as a brick and let their guard down, while he picks them apart bit by bit. Call it being "stupider like a fox", as Homer Simpson once coined the phrase.
The Democrats of the new millennium, much like the Raiders and Vikings of the '70s, are finding out that it's better to be lucky than great, and that when people look at the scoreboard, they're not terribly concerned about the minutiae of intelligence or principle or policy arcana. There is the scoreboard; we can see how many points each side has.
So right now, while it looks like Bush has a case of happy feet on Social Security privatization/reform/elimination/evisceration, while he scrambles from Montana to Florida trying to get Republicans on board before too many more gory details come out on what this scam really entails, and how much it will really cost, and how it really has nothing at all to do with "ownership", and everything to do with upward redistributive policy, and would have the ancillary benefit of driving a stake into the heart of the Democratic Party if successful -- while it looks like he's scrambling on third-and-long, he's waiting for the Democrats to get lazy and drop their guard. And they will; they always do. They are notoriously lazy and undisciplined, especially in zone coverage. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Bush knows, as do his coaches, that the crowd, the citizens, look mostly at the scoreboard. They do not know the name of every single player on the field; most of them do not see (or care about) the constant working of the refs (the media). Even when they do see the refs getting worked, they figure that both teams do that stuff to a certain extent, so they let it go. Except when that ref is Dan Rather.
For now, Bush is content to work his three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust game plan, as he slowly, relentlessly, plugs away. He has all spring and summer to plug away, after all. Even if post-election Iraq proves to be a pro-Iranian fiasco, he has already seen that the American people do not hold him -- or his minions -- responsible for any of their errors or disinformation, or even their chronic inability to just keep their basic story straight for three years running. He's just waiting for the Democrats to let their guard down, just for a split-second, to work that long bomb in.
The critical difference here is that, unlike the NFL, this political systemology does not work to the benefit of the spectators, or the viewers at home -- in fact, it works at cross purposes with our interests.
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