Here, it’s easy to enjoy the wait for the NFL to gear up again
The Patriots secured their sixth Super Bowl victory three weeks and three days ago, a stretch of time that left room for both reminiscing and moving on.
As a certain quarterback now working on a second hand’s worth of championship rings likes to say, his favorite Super Bowl win is the next one. (I’ll bet it’s really the first one, though.)
Yet these three-plus weeks later, there are reminders here and there — maybe you get them, too — of what the Patriots accomplished back on Feb. 3, when they grounded the allegedly high-flying Rams in a 13-3 win, their sixth championship and the city’s 12th in the four major sports since those 2001 Patriots started it all.
My standard reminders come in the newspapers scattered on my desk with headlines like “The dynasty rolls on’’ and “It never gets old.’’ I’m in no hurry to organize these still freshly printed flashbacks. The amusing reminder occurs every few times I yank my Globe-issued laptop out of my computer bag and a stray piece of confetti from the postgame celebration in Atlanta flutters out.
Occasionally, one of the escaped strays is shaped like a Lombardi Trophy, which apparently is the high-end stuff that gently rains down on Jim Nantz and championship-winning friends on the podium. Hmmm, wonder if there’s an eBay market for that sort of thing.
The Super Bowl isn’t just a celebration, but a blunt ending, a season’s conclusion. Yet it doesn’t always feel that way, especially when the franchise you follow is the victor. The 2018 season was a chapter in the ongoing epic story of the dynasty-era New England Patriots, the greatest football story ever told. And sometimes the end of one chapter and the beginning of another isn’t as obvious as it might seem.
During this stretch from the Super Bowl to Wednesday, when the 327 invitees to the NFL Combine will begin to endure the weirdest job application process in existence, there was enough news, or anticipation of news, to keep the Patriots in their usual prominent spot in our sports consciousness, even when there were no games to play.
I’m referring to football news, not the what’s-an-owner-like-him-doing-at-a-place-like-that news that reverberates in sundry, salacious, and seedy directions. The charges that Robert Kraft solicited prostitution at a Florida spa surely are humiliating for the Patriots owner and a franchise that likes to brand the “Patriot Way’’ as something worthy of aspiration beyond winning football games at a high rate.
But unless commissioner Roger Goodell follows former Jets linebacker and current New York talk-show host Bart Scott’s moronic advice and strips the Patriots of all of their 2019 draft choices, what happens with Kraft won’t have an effect on football matters. I imagine when Bill Belichick heard about the owner’s situation he probably mumbled something, snorted inadvertently, and went back to watching Kyler Murray tape. No days off, you know.
The main news so far is that safety Devin McCourty has said he will return next season. McCourty — smart, versatile, and more accomplished than his statistics often suggest — is a quintessential Patriot, though one wonders whether his $13.4 million cap hit in 2019 might require him to make that return at a lower wage.
As for the anticipation of news, we continue to await word on Rob Gronkowski’s plans for 2019 and whether he will join fellow 2010 rookie classmate McCourty in making it a decade as a Patriot. Stephen Gostkowski, the Patriots’ all-time leading scorer and — there’s no shame in this — the second-best kicker in franchise lore, is a free agent, and worthy of an extended stay. Soon there will be other major free agent matters to deal with, too. Didn’t Trey Flowers just get here? How can he be a free agent already?
I’m not one to pay more than cursory attention to the combine; Tom Brady’s famous bed-head combine photo is reason enough to dismiss 40-yard-dash times and such as anything more than data collection. But when the three-day draft extravaganza comes around April 25-27 in Nashville, well, then that will be especially worthy of attention this year. The Patriots own a dozen picks, including six in the first three rounds, a golden opportunity to add young talent — and perhaps even the eventual successor to Brady — to a title-winning roster.
Belichick gets some grief for the Ras-I Dowlings and Chad Jacksons that flunked out through the years. That’s just proof that it’s impossible to project the future for every player, and I’ll wait while his draft detractors find another executive who has found the all-time best player at a given position twice. (Brady and Gronkowski, and yes, I tried and failed to find a way to give him credit for Adam Vinatieri and John Hannah here as well.)
Belichick has also hit big on players the so-called experts underestimated along the way, most notably first-rounders McCourty in 2010 and Logan Mankins in ’05. There’s no better draft-day entertainment than watching Mel Kiper Jr.’s face contort in confusion and resignation when Belichick does something that doesn’t jibe with his draft board.
But the fun of the draft and the optimism it brings is still too many weeks away. In the meantime, we wait for more football news that actually has to do with football. And when those random confetti strays make their escape, we smile again at what already has been.
