I'm sick to death of monitoring a half dozen threads to react, angrily, to yet another attack on the NEP.
So...I'd rather have a thread that celebrates the reasons I love rooting for this team.
Here's a start: BB's latest press conference: http://www.patriots.com/news/2015/09/13/bill-belichick-conference-call-transcript-913
First up, staying rooted in the idea that it's a long season, through which improvement should be expected. Living in Toronto, I've always wondered why local fans don't expect the same of their hockey team (and I think that with Babcock as coach, they'll start to see it) - but teams that look the same 75% into the season as they do 25% should ask why their coach doesn't talk like this: "I thought [Grissom] had some good plays, did some good things. There are certainly some things he needs to work on. You could say that about just about everybody who played, regardless of what their previous status or level of previous experience or anything else was. We did some good things, but we all have a long way to go and we all have a lot of things we can improve on."
And here's another example, from a response about how the Pats found Dion Lewis. The whole answer is great, but here's just the end: "Different circumstances, he could've easily been on our roster last year, but it turned out that he wasn't, but I don't think that really affected our overall evaluation of the player. Again, you can only keep so many guys, and sometimes they slip through the cracks like that or guys get injured and miss a year and then they come back and resurface the next year. Sometimes they end up having a bigger impact than others, but we try to track those guys as best we can, as I'm pretty sure all teams in the league do."
Coaching up players week by week, keeping a shadow roster just in case...I mean, you expect teams to do this, but I believe that the Pats are just plain better at this kind of thing than many other teams are.
So...I'd rather have a thread that celebrates the reasons I love rooting for this team.
Here's a start: BB's latest press conference: http://www.patriots.com/news/2015/09/13/bill-belichick-conference-call-transcript-913
First up, staying rooted in the idea that it's a long season, through which improvement should be expected. Living in Toronto, I've always wondered why local fans don't expect the same of their hockey team (and I think that with Babcock as coach, they'll start to see it) - but teams that look the same 75% into the season as they do 25% should ask why their coach doesn't talk like this: "I thought [Grissom] had some good plays, did some good things. There are certainly some things he needs to work on. You could say that about just about everybody who played, regardless of what their previous status or level of previous experience or anything else was. We did some good things, but we all have a long way to go and we all have a lot of things we can improve on."
And here's another example, from a response about how the Pats found Dion Lewis. The whole answer is great, but here's just the end: "Different circumstances, he could've easily been on our roster last year, but it turned out that he wasn't, but I don't think that really affected our overall evaluation of the player. Again, you can only keep so many guys, and sometimes they slip through the cracks like that or guys get injured and miss a year and then they come back and resurface the next year. Sometimes they end up having a bigger impact than others, but we try to track those guys as best we can, as I'm pretty sure all teams in the league do."
Coaching up players week by week, keeping a shadow roster just in case...I mean, you expect teams to do this, but I believe that the Pats are just plain better at this kind of thing than many other teams are.