ironwasp
Rotational Player and Threatening Starter's Job
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Reading Borges this morning, and for the second week in a row I'm starting to think the guy's making some sense, with this opening to this week's On Football piece:
By Ron Borges | December 4, 2006
FOXBOROUGH -- The alarming part is not that they made mistakes. The alarming part is that they worked all week to correct those mistakes and then went out and repeated them.
But then I get down a little further and come across this little nugget of nonsense:
Is this a year when fumbles are not fumbles and field goals cut through blizzard conditions like a rolling ball of butcher knives?
Is this a year when things go right even when they go wrong?
I think not, but then again, thus far one has to think so.
So you think so, Ron? Or you don't? Which is it?
You have an editing strike going on over there at the Globe?
But all in all, there's a lot of sense in what Borges writes this week, and it marks him out as a guy that understands the game and understands how sportsmen's minds work.
His central thesis - that the Patriots won't get away with the sloppy crap from last Sunday when they play the Ravens or Chargers - is as obvious as it is correct.
But his analysis that, however much the Pats guard against it, there is a constant danger of complacency and a small degree of inevitability about it setting in is spot on:
It is easy enough for a team that has had as much success as the Patriots over the past five years to slip into this kind of mind-set. They look at their recent faux pas and acknowledge they cannot continue, yet they then skip quickly along to the fact that they won anyway. The bane of existence for coaches of such teams is to hear his players say, as so many Patriots did yesterday, "We made the plays when we had to."
We'll see again what the frame of mind is when we hit Miami next week, and then perhaps even more so, if we win in Miami, what we get in a supposedly straightforward game against the Texans.
Because at the moment something - something intangible - is not quite right, and it needs sorting quickly.
By Ron Borges | December 4, 2006
FOXBOROUGH -- The alarming part is not that they made mistakes. The alarming part is that they worked all week to correct those mistakes and then went out and repeated them.
But then I get down a little further and come across this little nugget of nonsense:
Is this a year when fumbles are not fumbles and field goals cut through blizzard conditions like a rolling ball of butcher knives?
Is this a year when things go right even when they go wrong?
I think not, but then again, thus far one has to think so.
So you think so, Ron? Or you don't? Which is it?
You have an editing strike going on over there at the Globe?
But all in all, there's a lot of sense in what Borges writes this week, and it marks him out as a guy that understands the game and understands how sportsmen's minds work.
His central thesis - that the Patriots won't get away with the sloppy crap from last Sunday when they play the Ravens or Chargers - is as obvious as it is correct.
But his analysis that, however much the Pats guard against it, there is a constant danger of complacency and a small degree of inevitability about it setting in is spot on:
It is easy enough for a team that has had as much success as the Patriots over the past five years to slip into this kind of mind-set. They look at their recent faux pas and acknowledge they cannot continue, yet they then skip quickly along to the fact that they won anyway. The bane of existence for coaches of such teams is to hear his players say, as so many Patriots did yesterday, "We made the plays when we had to."
We'll see again what the frame of mind is when we hit Miami next week, and then perhaps even more so, if we win in Miami, what we get in a supposedly straightforward game against the Texans.
Because at the moment something - something intangible - is not quite right, and it needs sorting quickly.