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You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know to Defer When You Win the Coin Toss

During this century, the New England Patriots have won many more games than they've lost in the month of December. Of course, this is also true of the months of September, October and November, but there's just something about how the Pats tend to finish strong that brings out the laziest, most hackneyed prose imaginable by football commentators.

The boring truth, which is that the NFL back loads schedules to feature divisional games during the stretch run of each season and that the other three teams in the AFC East haven't been very good for a very long time never seems to come up. Instead, we are assured there is some mystical bond between the Patriots' victories and how December is when New England weather really starts to suck. So beloved is this inane false correlation that actual weather conditions don't apply to it.

"Pats heat up as the weather cools off" was the headline of one newspaper story last week previewing the Patriots game against the Chargers last night, a game played in San Diego, California, the American city with the best year-round weather. Going one better, NBC color man Cris Collinsworth talked about how the Pats got better as the weather got colder as the game was going on. Regrettably, his words were not followed by a cut to a shot of the skimpily dressed Chargers cheerleaders on a typically pleasant southern California evening.

Despite the lack of chilblains among the spectators, the Patriots won 23-14 anyway. Maybe Bill Belichick showed videos of Boston local TV weather forecasts for his pregame pep talk.

posted by Michael Gee @ 8:44 AM