While thinking about all of the subplots and intricacies of Super Bowl XLII, I keep coming back to one thing…karma.  I hate to sound like a tree-hugger here, but the most important game of the NFL season might come down to the karma of the two teams. 

Let’s start the karma discussion with this statement:

How fitting is it that the Patriots and the Giants, the two teams that duked it out in Week 17 instead of resting their players, are going to meet again on Sunday? 

While every other team with the option to do so rested their starters for a significant part of the game, these two teams decided to sack up and throw haymakers at each other for 60 minutes and live up to every single second of the pre-game hype.  It was only mildly impressive that the Patriots went for it…they were looking at 16-0 immortality, but the Giants conceivably had nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming out swinging.  Well, they did just that, going toe-to-toe with the Pats, and they started stockpiling a large amount of positive karma.  They are on an amazing run right now, they have confidence in a coach and QB that may never inspire confidence again in any situation after this season, and they are on the brink of making history.

About the game — three networks was not enough.  That game should have been broadcast worldwide!  It was truly amazing.  It was perhaps the second best regular season game I have seen in my lifetime, behind only Emmitt Smith’s defining moment against the Giants in January of 1994.  In fact, LaDainian Tomlinson should watch a tape of that game during the off-season…he might learn a few things.

So, back on task — the basics of karma work like this — if you act like a d-bag, bad things will probably come back to bite you; if you act in the opposite manner of what a d-bag would do, you will probably have good luck.  Please, no angry e-mails from Buddhists or Sanskrit scholars…I know that is a gross oversimplification and probably not even entirely correct.  So, the Patriots have pretty much acted like d-bags for the entire year…and I am here to tell you that I think it is going to cost them the Super Bowl. 

Bill Simmons (probably one of my favorite sports writers of all time, by the way…what can I say, I am a Red Sox fan) wrote a whole article about how the Patriots had a clear message for the rest of the league and there was a defining “Eff You” moment of every game.  You can read it here if you missed it.  I thought it was a pretty good article, and I still do…but the more that I started thinking about it, I just kept seeing a karmic disaster of epic proportions.  Sometimes it’s even difficult to see it with this Patriots team, because there is a lot of rhetoric about team first and we are just taking them one game at a time.  To some extent, they are all a bunch of throwbacks and are probably good for the game on some level…but they have done way too much bad stuff to be let off the hook.

The first thing they did was cheat.  I could probably write 1,000 words or more about that one and not even begin to do the subject justice, especially when writers far more qualified and talented than myself have already written about it.  Then, they decided to run up the score every week for a while.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the speed and athleticism of the modern game, but during those weeks, I wished that for once, it could be 1954…after the first blow-out, the Patriots training room would have been full of injured Pats before halftime of the next game, and they would have started respecting the game and the league the next week.

I will not dissect each and every “Eff You” moment the Patriots had this year, just the most egregious of them all, and the one nearest and dearest to my heart as a Cowboys fan.  On 4th-and-goal at the Dallas 1 yard line, leading by 14 points with 23 seconds left to play, the Patriots went for it on 4th down and scored a TD.  Kicking the field goal would have been a classier move; taking a knee would have been classier still…but class has never been a concern for the 2007-2008 New England Patriots.

Such a despicable act has not been committed in Texas Stadium since Terrell Owens did his little dance on the star.  You saw what happened to T.O. after that — he got horse-collared by Roy Williams, breaking his leg and probably costing the Eagles a Super Bowl in the process (even though he almost single-handedly beat the Pats on one leg).  He then became a well-documented train wreck.  The only way he could set things right was to actually join the Cowboys.  That’s what happens when you mess with America’s team.  By the way, how awkward do you think T.O.’s first conversation was with his new teammate, Roy Williams?

Since that “Eff You” TD in Dallas, the Patriots have had it coming…and there is only one game left.  To make matters worse, they have pretty much done a bunch of equally classless things to a bunch of other franchises and disrespected the league and the game at every turn since that heinous display in America’s Stadium.  At the time, I predicted that karmic justice would be served on Brady’s knee in the Super Bowl against the Cowboys.  Nothing malicious, just something like what happened to Jim Kelly in the first Dallas-Buffalo Super Bowl, when you could almost hear the life come out of Buffalo’s entire fan base all at once.

While that might have been a good comeuppance, I do not think it can compare to what would happen to Pats Nation if the Jints win the game outright, with no Pats injuries, in dramatic fashion.  I can not personally disparage the members of Pats Nation too much, since they are also members of my beloved Red Sox nation, but if the Pats have acted like d-bags on the field this year, what would you say the Pats fans have acted like this year?  Is there a term more powerful than d-bag that we can find to describe their behavior?

As a football fan, I would love to see a close, clean, hard-fought Super Bowl XLII.  As a Cowboys fan, I would love to see the Jints get it done, so I could say “if not for all those drops in the second half, that would be the Cowboys.”  As a parent of two young children, I hope karma jumps up and bites the Patriots.  I can think of no better example to show them of what happens when you act like you do not respect the game or the league that made you rich.  I don’t even care how it happens, as long as it is dramatic.  I have thought about this for a long time, and I think my preferred method would be a completely missed non-reviewable call in overtime…every time a Pats fan started to whine about it, you could just look them in the eye and simply say:

Karma’s a bitch, huh?

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