Super Bowl: The Patriots' Quest for Perfection

Before I begin about college basketball, I want to go into the NFL season that just came into conclusion.

The 2007-2008 NFL season was one where we experienced the ultimate best and worst teams that the NFL has seen in quite sometime, the New England Patriots and the Miami Dolphins. The Patriots will now live in infamy as they lost their final game of the season to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, the final stop in a possible 19-0 season. From now and forever, Patriot's head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady will be linked to their failure to complete “the perfect season.”

More than anything, NFL analysts, fans, and commentators would circle the New England game every week. It became almost a habit to figure out some way, somehow that the Patriots had a disadvantage. The combination of coach Belichick's personality, Tom Brady's and the teams perfection, Spygate, and their crazed beatings at the start of the season, including a 52-7 massacre of Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs and the Washington Redskins, lead to the hate towards the Patriots. They became the target for all non-Patriots fans the rest of the season.

I am an Indianapolis Colts fan, and although a repeat championship would have been great, I became focused more on the Patriots’ quest for perfection. It almost became a religion for fans to watch Patriots games throughout the season looking for them to lose. Every game seemed to show more and more of the weaknesses of the Patriots. The Colts game in Week 9, the Eagles game in Week 12, followed by the Ravens game in Week 13, and finally the Giants game in Week 16 all came down to the wire, but somehow the Patriots won. They won by skill, coaching, and even a little bit of luck.

As I watched the Super Bowl progress, I continued to lack confidence in the Giants, even though they were playing incredible defense. I was waiting for the one moment, one drive or one play to change the landscape of the game. I was waiting for the one that came so often during the regular season. When they marched down the field in their second-to-last possession with ease, I felt it happening again. They capped it off with a touchdown to put them up 14-10, seeming to inevitably end the game like they always had. But for some forsaken reason, Eli Manning became a Super Bowl Legend. His play in their final drive, along with some giant luck, put the Patriots entire season in shambles.

The New England Patriots now would have been better off losing one of those games in the regular season and winning the Super Bowl, then continuing their pursuit of perfection and losing the Super Bowl. Easier said than done I guess.

This year’s Super Bowl will always rank as one of my favorite Super Bowls because of its implications on history, the excitement during the 4th quarter, and finally seeing the New England Patriots fall flat on their face as perfection slipped through their grasp.