I have been a fan of the Pats since the snowblower, but feel that this attitude hurts them in terms of superiority. They had the Giants against the wall a couple of Yeats ago and started to play as not to loose rather than to win. And they lost the perfect season ad an result.
Funny, because Yeats is exactly what I have in mind when I imagine what must be going on in Brady's head when he considers facing Manning in the playoffs this year:
[SIZE=+1]
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)[/SIZE]
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?