Says Ray Ratto on Deadspin.com:
The helmet logo is really a postmodern graphic representation of My Little Pony, and Bill Belichick is Conan O’Brien with a snootful of helium.
Absolutely.
The idea is wrong, though, because the Patriots are no longer evil for the reasons you want them to be.
Besides, are they really more detestable than the Los Angeles Rams, who fled St. Louis on a train whose tracks were lined with middle fingers so they could help recolonize a city that hates local professional football?
Or the game officials who cannot see cynical rules violations play out in real time before their faces because the game is too fast and the players have been taught that the risk of getting caught is way less than the reward for having cheated?
Or the competition committee, which has built through its laziness a rulebook thicker than a rhinoceros frittata and about as digestible?
Or Roger Goodell, the front man for a football company that can no longer present football?
Or his 32 bosses, for whom he takes the bullets because they know we in the journalism dodge are too lazy to name them all every time the league does something stupid or vile?
Or the Super Bowl itself, which is nothing more than an annually perpetrated trade show with an occasionally amusing football game tacked onto the end of it?
The Patriots?
They’re now merely the most familiar part of the ensemble, playing the main character in a show on which supporting actors have the more interesting roles. More to the point, they are the one unchanging character in a show that struggles desperately to be different every time—kind of like the Oscars, only with the same movies every year.
The Patriots are designated as evil because they used to be evil, and you decided they should always be evil when what they should be faulted for is persistently being, well, “there.”
Sort of like Maroon 5, for those of you who think the Super Bowl halftime is a cultural metaphor rather than a 25-minute beer-and-bathroom break:
