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The Devils We Know Always Seem Like Angels

The Patriots have thus far approached free agency with a relatively free spending approach -- so long as the players they have signed were already on the roster. New England re-signed Vince Wilfork, Leigh Bodden, Stephen Neal, Kevin Faulk, etc. rather than (so far) get out there and win bidding wars for the likes of Anquan Boldin and Julius Peppers.

This is a consistent and highly defensible approach to football free agency. The late George Young, whose Giants teams had a fair amount of success, once said that the free agents a franchise signed never helped as much as the free agents it lost hurt it, and there is much evidence to support his theory. There's also a lot of evidence to refute it, which is always the problem with football theories, but whether or not the Pats have made the right choices with their 2010 personnel budget is not the point of this post. I am more interested in public opinion.

Based on a highly informal survey of hotspots of Patriot fandom in my life, such as the car wash, the packy, and selected fellow employees at my workplace, the Pats' approach is a popular one. Fans who understandably were somewhat distraught by the stink bomb their team let off in the playoffs have expressed relief, reassurance, and a modest degree of optimism. If all is not well with their team, neither is all lost.

(The one exception to this policy, the loss of Ben Watson to the Browns, has generated more comment in the media than from my sources among the fan proletariat. In this, I side with the fans. A great tight end is always welcome. A merely OK tight end can be replaced without undue stress or expense. Bluntly put, nobody wins or loses a Super Bowl because of their tight end.)

This reaction is not surprising. In my experience, fans everywhere, but especially in Boston, have a common set of reactions to free agent transactions. When a team signs a big one, they're happy. But they're nowhere near as happy as they are upset when one of their OWN players leaves to be a free agent somewhere else. They might be mad at the player for deserting them, they might be mad at management for letting their hero get away, but they're always mad.

Sometimes it's easy to see why this is. Fans of downtrodden franchises with cheapskate owners see the annual strip-mining of their roster via free agency or financially-forced trades as the ultimate expression of the hopelessness of their emotional commitment, and despair. But it's even true for fans of winners.

A Yankee fan of my acquaintance is sadder that Hideki Matsui and Johnny Damon are no longer in New York than he is happy that Curtis Granderson has become a Yank, even though he KNOWS this is illogical, and New York theoretically has improved itself. He can't help it.

Familiarity, it seems, does not breed contempt. It breeds, well, familiarity. A player good enough to be a desirable free agent is a player good enough for a fan to count on, to factor in as something close to a constant in the chaotic, fickle pursuit of victory. This sentiment, I would argue, is a root element of the human condition. People hate change. They bitch about Daylight Savings Time, let alone losing a nose tackle to the Jets.

No team in any sport in the past decade has been more willing to ignore that sentiment than the New England Patriots, who have been more than moderately ruthless in allowing valued contributors to championship seasons to go elsewhere for the financial rewards of their performances. Deion Branch, Asante Samuel, well, we all know the list. And the Pats got away with it, too. The team's performance has not suffered -- unless you count failing to win Super Bowls as suffering. I don't, although I know many people do.

So I would never in a million years suggest that the Pats' decision to re-up most of their free agent eligible veterans was anything other than their customary cold, fact-based assessment of their situation as a football team, their best guess at their best chance for improving on a 10-6, first round playoff loss season.

I will say, however, that as a general rule, the amount of attention a sports team pays to the opinions of its fans varies in inverse proportion to its won-loss record.

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:29 AM