this "follow the team until Brady Belichick retire" thing is confounding. Can anyone explain the reasoning? It sounds fair-weather.
Personally, it goes something like this. Brady and Belichick have been in my life since I was 16. My connection to them is borderline weird, and my attachment by level goes something like this:
1: Belichick, Brady
2: Patriots
3: football in general
4. NFL
There was a time when I might have put the Patriots over Belichick/Brady, but that's no longer the case. And FWIW, in basketball, baseball, and hockey, 1 and 2 are always flipped; I always root for the team first and the players second. But for football, right now my feelings towards 2 through 4 can be described as anything between conflicted and disgusted. Kraft's actions--starting with Spygate, hitting a new level with his public endorsement of Goodell during the Ray Rice fiasco, and culminating in his Deflategate capitulation--has me feeling a bit bitter toward the Patriots. Everything we've learned about CTE and the fact that it's probably intrinsic to football has left me deeply conflicted about the sport, and pretty much everything that's happened in the last decade has filled me with nothing but contempt for the NFL.
But as long as Brady and Belichick are around, my rooting interest in them is uncompromised. They're basically the reason I'm still here at all, because I respect the hell out of them, enjoy rooting for them, and don't have any reservation at all in doing so. The few players/coaches that I'm invested in are the only part of going to a game and rooting for the Patriots that is completely black and white, and that I don't feel in any way conflicted about.
Once Brady and Belichick are gone, the top level of that hierarchy is gone, and it just leaves a sport, a franchise, and a league that I'm uneasy at best and disgusted at worst to support. It's not about abandoning ship when the team becomes bad. The Pats have been consistently good since I was a teenager, but I've rooted for some really bad Celtics, Red Sox, and Bruins teams. It wasn't enough for the 1993-2007 Celtics to be bad, my favorite player had to die on the practice court for good measure. The Bruins were so bad that I got to watch my favorite player's career ended on a dirty play that destroyed his hip, then a few years later watched Boston throw a parade for
another team winning the Stanley Cup because it meant at least one of our guys got to win something. Never stopped watching, though. It takes a whole lot more than an awful team for me to contemplate abandoning a sport, team, or league entirely.
I already watch way fewer non-Patriots games than I used to. Partly because I hate the league at large, and partly because every time a player goes down, I find myself wondering exactly how many years he just took off his life and how much trouble that'll give him with maintaining basic mobility and the ability to recognize his children into his 50s, let alone old age. The NFL, the sport of football, and the Patriots have together created the kind of perfect storm that I never would have seen coming in a million years pre-2007, but taking all of it together I've decided that once Brady and Belichick are gone, I can't imagine there will be anything keeping me here.
