Off Day Notes: Time to talk Pats

"...the public perception of the Patriots is changed forever."-Dan Shaughnessy, today's Globe

Since Boston is enjoying some "much-deserved personal time", i.e. its first day off in nearly two weeks, I thought I would take some time & space here to discuss RSN's other obsession, the New England Patriots.

You may have heard that the NFL draft was this past weekend, or if like me if you happened to watch any ESPN during that time your brain may have been melted into an inorganic goo of combine numbers, 'best available' lists and 40 times, complete with a rolling crawl on the bottom and a side graphic box good for further clouding your already suspect judgement.

And I'm sure you heard the big news out of the draft- no, not that National Championship-winning quarterback and soon-to-be professional model Chris Leak went undrafted-but that the Pats made two moves that brought players of highly questionable moral character into the straitlaced Foxborough fold. (Well other than the staring QB fathering 2 children out of wedlock they're straitlaced.)

Brandon Meriweather and Randy Moss bring an immediate combination of speed, toughness, attitude and skill to two positions the Pats needed a lot of help at: the secondary and wide receiver. They also tote enough baggage to make a veteran skycap at Logan wince. The lists of incidents involving both players is both lengthy and well-documented, so I'm not going to pick at the scabs of those painful memories.

Let's just say that when things like gun possession, drug use, squirting water at an official, on-field brawling, running over a traffic cop, and quitting on your teammates are on such lists, well they're really no question about your character.

To quote Trick Daddy, maybe it's because you're a thug. Or a punk. Or at the very least an angry, selfish, malcontent capable of ripping apart a team's chemistry at any given moment, provoked or not.

In other words the exact type of player New England would never allow to grace the huddle, no matter how much talent or ability to win such a player would bring to the team.

Yet in their quest to get back to the promised land of NFL championships the New England brain trust, a.k.a. The Hooded Genius, capo Scott Pioli and the Kraft family, have decided to skip with past protocols and head in a different direction. They have opened up their team as a sort of rehab for players in need of some serious image counseling, achieved by holding the Rozelle Trophy high over one's head, thereby rendering all past transgressions null & void.

After all, it worked for Cory Dillon, didn't it?

But as the old saying goes, "what price victory?" Sure the Pats are mightily improved with these two additions, and many 'experts' are already proclaiming them as a lock for the Super Bowl next year.

I say so what. Didn't the team come within a Dominic"I peed myself" Rhodes last-minute touchdown of making it to the title game this year? And didn't that happen after the team stuck to its principals by not granting a certain wide receiver a contract extension, which led to his hasty departure for the Pacific Northwest just as the season got underway?

The point I'm trying to make is that the Patriot machine has been making boys into men and mediocre players into championship winners for almost a decade now by following a radical-but-effective approach: bring in high-quality guys with a desire to win and be part of a championship team and play the NFL game the right way...

...why scrap that plan now and subscribe to the Chucky Gruden "I don't care about their past just as long as they do it for me on the field tomorrow" method of building a contender?

It's ironic that just as the league heads towards a "zero tolerance" policy with troubled players, the league's model franchise sheds its image of being the original "zero tolerance" organization.

Because as a Patriot fan I know I just don't have a good feeling about adding Meriweather and Moss and even Donte Stallworth to the team to the team, even if they do help bring that 4th title to town. I know that I was a lot happier when New England drafted a diamond-in-the-rough nobody like Logan Mankins and molded him into a solid NFL player, rather than attempting to turn a turkey into a swan like they are with Meriweather.

And I was a lot more proud of a team that won titles with guys like Bruschi, Vinateri, Brown, Vrabel and Harrison than I would be with a with a me-first prima donna who jaked his way out of Oakland and is just gravy-training the Patriot experience in order to win that elusive ring.

So you tell me, which side is worse?