“I’d just like to use this occasion to announce my retirement, undefeated, from the world of video boxing.” – Bart Simpson
As meaningless sports achievements go, having the New England Patriots go 16-0 is pretty remarkable. It hasn’t happened in twenty-five years and there’s a decent case to be made that the Patriots had a harder going of it than those old Dolphins; if the Pats win on Saturday night you’ll see it made repeatedly. The addition of the salary cap will be mentioned as will the extension of the regular season from fourteen to sixteen games. If you want to you could also throw in expansion, technical changes in the game and any other ways the league has evolved since 1972. I think most of that is bunk, comparing teams from different seasons can be entertaining, but it’s pointless.
What isn’t pointless is the fact that the Patriots might be on the verge of crossing over from NFL dynasty to pop-culture reference point. If you want a meaningful difference between the 1972 Dolphins and the 2007 Patriots, it’s that in 1972 there was no internet, no ESPN, and the NFL wasn’t yet the biggest sports league in the country by a huge margin. Today we have all those extra outlets for sports information and the NFL is in a league of its own in terms of popularity. NFL lore speaks highly of dynastic teams, the Steelers of the seventies, the 49ers of the eighties, and the Cowboys of the nineties to name the three most famous examples. But really they’re just NFL teams that had a few good years and nobody cares about them outside of the context of football. The same may not be true of these Patriots.
The first place it’ll be noticed is in the ratings. The Patriots are playing at eight pm on a Saturday night, one of the two weakest nights for television viewership. But I’ll bet you it’s the highest rated game ever on the NFL Network, it’ll probably even trounce many more widely available channels that normally would be expected to outdo anything on the NFL Network. Then we’ll have the playoffs and I’ll all but guarantee you that any game the Pats play sets records as well, especially if they play the Colts and Peyton Manning in the AFC championship game. Should the Patriots advance to the Super Bowl, you’d better batten the hatches and nail everything down because even by Super Bowl standards the media hurricane will be a Category 5. It’ll shatter all kinds of ratings records and set a standard that will be all but impossible for next year to match.
And if they win, if they go 19-0, then watch out man, because we’re going to be hearing about it for a very long time. Books will be written about the team, that’s a forgone conclusion; movies might even be made. But anything that successful will also garner attention from other quarters. Eventually the Writers Guild will go back to work and all manner of scripts, for plays, television programs and movies are going to reference the Patriots. It’s not part of some dark Boston marketing ploy, it’s just a famous event that a wide audience will understand. Guests and hosts on talk shows of every variety, from sex and dating to politics and sports and everything in between, will have a new reference point to play with. Self help authors looking to pad their word counts will talk about how the Patriots are a perfect example of their system for improvement and success. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, probably it’s neither, but the Patriots’ perfect season will be with us in ways we’d never expect. Provided, of course, that they don’t lose.
