No Class

– That said, it was pathetic the way Belichick ran off on his team, to leave the old guys on the defense to go out there and stand for one final snap. Whatever happened to the idea of a coach and players being in it together, win or lose? Not Belichick. They lost and he was outta there.

– Belichick’s aging defense couldn’t stop Eli Manning and the Giants on two crucial fourth-quarter possessions. They didn’t have the legs to keep up. I can’t help but think that all the blowouts., all the times that Belichick ran up the score, played a role in this. So many times this season, the Patriots kept their starters on the field much longer than they needed to, as Belichick tried to humiliate other coaches in some bizarre act of revenge for being fined for his cheating. Well, on Sunday night in the Valley, the age and the arrogance finally caught up to Belichick and his defense.

– Belichick and staff were outcoached. The Giants had better tactics on both sides of the ball. The Pats never adjusted to the Giants’ decision to go after Tom Brady, who was sacked five times and smacked around all night. And the Patriots were surprisingly flat, considering that they had a perfect season and a another Super Bowl championship on the line. “The Giants had a better game plan than we did, they came ready to play four quarters,” Patriots wideout Randy Moss said. “I think their intensity from the beginning to the end was higher than ours. It surprised me, because of all the work we put in the last two weeks.“It’s hard to explain. I don’t really have words for it.”

– Rams coach Scott Linehan can learn something from Giants coach Tom Coughlin. Give Coughlin credit for improving his player relations by empowering the players to state their views and have a voice in how the team was being run. Coughlin’s “Player Council” was a good idea and Linny should do the same.

That’s all for now. Time to fly and make my way back to the STL …

Thanks for reading.

-B

Wallace Matthews

February 5, 2008

Sometimes a man’s character, if not his whole life, can be encapsulated in the blink of an eye. For Scottie Pippen, it was the moment he decided to sit down rather than play out the last 1.8 seconds of a crucial playoff game when he learned the final shot would not be his. For Mike Tyson, it was the moment he decided it would be easier to bite his way out of a beating from Evander Holyfield than to face it.

And for Bill Belichick, it was when he decided that 59 minutes and 59 seconds of a football game, no, the football game, was enough for him.

His Patriots had played a superb season, 18 straight wins, and a damned fine Super Bowl XLII, but now it was about to end. They had been outhit, outsmarted and outplayed by the underdog Giants, a team that was hungrier and, yes, just plain better than them on this night. With the Patriots having turned the ball over on downs, the three-point deficit New England faced now was officially insurmountable.

But there still was one second left on the clock. One more snap needed to be taken, one more play needed to be run, one more tick had to tock before they could put it in the books.

The game wasn't over yet and the players knew it, the officials knew it and the fans knew it.

All Bill Belichick knew was that it was over as far as he was concerned.

And so he took the walk that true losers take, the walk of shame, off the field and up the tunnel and out of any claim he once may have had to a sense of dignity or honor or sportsmanship. You know he didn't walk out of any stadium before the final gun of any of those 18 wins, but now he couldn't wait to run away from his only loss.

Way to go, Coach.

It really shouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that Belichick is a bad loser; after all, he's a bad winner, too. Ask Eric Mangini, for one. But that doesn't make it any less disturbing or infuriating to watch.

The best time to judge a man's character is not when things are going well for him, but poorly. This was the first time all season that anything went wrong for Belichick and the Patriots. You saw how well he handled it.

Yeah, sure, he sought out Tom Coughlin, his conqueror, before he left, and did what it obviously killed him to have to do: credit another man for beating him. But he robbed Coughlin of the moment every Super Bowl-winning coach is entitled to, a gracious midfield concession by the loser.

So instead of the perfect season, we got the perfect sore loser, the perfect sourpuss, the perfect rat. The coach who couldn't even stick around one more second to pay proper tribute to a worthy opponent and lead his own equally worthy players out of the stadium in a respectful manner.

Of all the shameful and shameless things Belichick has done in the course of his career, that one second of disgrace should follow him around for the rest of his life.

Because this can't just be shrugged off as gamesmanship, as Belichick's apologists have done on Spygate, and it can't be characterized as a personality conflict, as they have done to justify his treatment of Mangini, and it can't be explained away as a shy, socially awkward man's bungling attempt to extricate himself from a bad situation, as I mistakenly did with his infamous "I hereby resign as HC of the NYJ" note of eight years ago.

No, this was simply a public hissy fit by a spoiled punk who couldn't accept defeat. There was nothing fluky or controversial or questionable about the Giants' 17-14 win. In fact, it was the kind of game Belichick should have admired, even if for once he came out on the wrong end of it. Instead, he acted as if he were the victim of some particularly heinous crime.

By walking away before the game was over, maybe Belichick thought he was diminishing Coughlin and the Giants, the way he tried to diminish Mangini and the Jets last season. But all he did was diminish himself and the players who had fought so hard for him all season. He brought shame upon an organization that had brought him nothing but glory. Regardless of whether they would be willing to admit it, he embarrassed his owner, his players, his assistant coaches and his fans. If he has any left.

There's no shame in losing but plenty of shame in losing gracelessly. In losing to the Giants, the Patriots had nothing to be ashamed of. They may have lost, but they weren't losers. On Super Bowl Sunday, that honor was the sole property of their coach.

Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.

This  time  from  North Andover, MA

Time for classless Belichick to eat some humble pie

—

On Pro Football

Michael Muldoon

He's been deified, and rightly so.

Now it's time to be vilified, and rightly so.

Bill Belichick was badly outcoached and just as disturbing was again classless after the Greatest Team Ever Assembled (GTEA) was pushed around by the presumed sacrificial lambs from New York in Super Bowl XLII.

But the Giants were Giant Killers, thanks to MVP Eli Manning, who came of age on sports' biggest stage, the relentless defensive line play of speedy linemen Osi Umenyiora, Michael Strahan and Justin Tuck (Rules), and the subpar performance by the HC of the GTEA.

Belichick has enjoyed a glorious eight-year run in New England — four Super Bowl appearances and three titles is still mindboggling in the salary-cap era. He still might be the greatest coach of all-time (and are you ruling out the Pats next year?), but not as great as we've built him up to be.

At least he wasn't Sunday night.

The Patriots had the talent, the cachet, the perfect record, the incomparable quarterback, the once-in-a-lifetime wide receiver going against a suspect at best defensive backfield, and perhaps most importantly, Belichick.

The great Belichick had two weeks to prepare

... for a Wild Card team!

... for an unproven Eli Manning!

... for a team with six losses!

... for a team coached by Tom Coughlin, who not only had never won the big one, but had never even been to the big one.

Who among us wasn't cockier than Muhammad Ali in his prime that Belichick was going to make all the right adjustments?

The only adjustment he seemed to make was to the drawstrings on his hoodie.

Maybe the look-at-me-America! dapper red hoodie was too tight and cut off blood flow to the brain.

How else to explain the inability to slow down the Giants' pass rush? Worse yet, to even try to slow them down. The Giants sackmeisters were huffing and puffing but no hurry-up offense from the Pats?

How else to explain Randy Moss being such a minor part of the game plan against the aforementioned group of Ellis Hobbs wannabees that comprise the Giants' defensive backfield?

You have to wonder about Moss' future in Foxboro after he made a point to include coaching among the Patriots' problems Sunday night in the desert.

America got its wish, the reviled Patriots layed an egg at the most inopportune time. Of course, it could be argued they were merely stellar, not historically dominant, in the second half of the season.

The most frequently used analogy for this mismatch was Mike Tyson vs. Buster Douglas, and we all know how that one turned out.

But Belichick was more of an ogre in defeat than Tyson.

Should we be surprised?

He's become too big for his britches and we've become complicit in his often contemptible behavior. This isn't about revealing injuries, or running up the score, or shaking a rival coaches hand, or illegally taping opponents, or refusing to ever give a straight answer ... all things which even the legion of Belichick sycophants refuse to call him on.

As college basketball all-time wins leader Bobby Knight, a person Belichick seems to be morphing into, discovered decades ago, if you win the big one, people will put up with almost anything.

But as Knight also discovered, when you fail to win the big one, which has been the case the last three years in New England, you don't get carte blanche to act like a jerk.

That's the only way to describe Belichick's actions after the game. With referee Mike Carey trying to give him a 15-yard horse collar to get him back on the sideline, Belichick continued to march across the field despite there being a second left to play.

He gave Coughlin an awkward hug, continued on to the locker room and later gave one of his intentionally painfully bland interviews with Fox's Chris Myers.

Just the latest examples of classless behavior by a coach who needs to consume some of his homemade humble pie.

Let's not forget, when Moss, who was then starring for the Vikings, left the field early during a 2004 game against the Redskins, he was fittingly taken to task in the strongest of terms. And that was a regular-season game.

In this his darkest hour for his coaching and his classlessness, Belichick deserves the same treatment.

Michael Muldoon is sports editor of The Eagle-Tribune. E-mail him at mmuldoon@eagletribune.com.

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