This is the most appealing part of the debate. Yes, this is about a football coach who made a surprising decision. Really, it doesn't matter. It's a game with an oddly shaped ball. But -- and I'll write this at the risk of wading into a deep end where I don't belong -- it is also, maybe, illustrative in revealing a Capital-T Truth about the way we think and act and maybe if there is a flaw there.
On Sunday night, pretty much everyone watching saw the offense run out there, thought, oh my God, what is he thinking, this is different and weird and so, so wrong. Me, too. The more I think and read about the decision, the more certain I am Belichick did the absolute right thing. Those who continue to believe he was wrong, I think, are wedded more to convention than to the truth of the matter. The argument for punting boils down most the time to this phrase: You have to punt there. You know what? No, you do not. The established thing to do is to punt there. The empirical evidence declares this to be wrong. But 31 of 32 coaches would have punted. Convention persists.
Again, I am probably in over my head here, and this is a Patriots blog, and I don't blame if you don't care. But how often do we do things because You Have To Do X There? Education, health care, garbage pick-up, coffee brewing, newspaper publishing -- how often are we doing things, to our detriment, because that's the way we've always done them? That's what Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fourth down from his own 28 is making me think about.
