The tradition of the NFL playoffs pits the best teams in football against one another crafting timeless narratives out of preternatural athleticism tested to its limits and the trials of the human spirit. Or not. The 12-4 AFC South champions Houston Texans suck. They're "frauds." Sunday's game against New England is a forgone conclusion; The Patriots have already won. All of that is true, at least according to The Boston Globe, it is.
"Could this get any easier? I mean, seriously? The planets are aligned and the tomato cans are in place. The fraudulent Houston Texans are the only team standing between the New England Patriots and a trip to the AFC Championship game," writes Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy.
Gearing up for Sunday's divisional playoff between the Patriots and Texans, Shaughnessy is clearly looking to stoke the competitive fire and publicity for his column, and his antagonizing, naively dismissive piece in the Globe is more than likely to catch the attention of even the most casual Houston fan. Of course, the entirety of his reasoning for why this game is such a lock is based on some incredibly flimsy logic: because Shaughnessy has likely watched the Texans play one game this season - the team's 42-14 loss to the Patriots - this game is over before it even starts.
To really drive his point home, he baselessly compares the Texans to the 2010 Jets, who were able to beat the Patriots after New England beat them in the regular season.
"Those Jets had players and a coach who did not wet their pants at the sight of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. Those Jets had attitude. The 2012-13 Texans? Pure frauds. The worst 11-1 team in the history of the NFL. These Texans have absolutely zero chance of beating New England here next week. And everybody knows that this is true."
The Texans might have begun to falter towards the end of the season, but perhaps Shaughnessy is forgetting Houston also easily delivered losses earlier in the season to the other two teams still left in the AFC playoffs, and that New England didn't exactly finish its season strong, either.
I expect there are plenty of people who've watched more than Patriots football all season long that would respectfully disagree. In fact, New England QB Tom Brady is one of them.
In a recent interview, Brady cautioned fans against assuming this game would play out identically to the match-up earlier in the season between the two teams.
"I don't think that game is going to have any bearing on what happens next week," he said Monday morning on the "Dennis & Callahan show" on Boston sports radio station WEEI. "It was a big win for our season, it was a big win at that time, but this game is going to be entirely different, and we've got to be able to put just as much preparation into this game as we did before."
Brady added that it's a rookie mistake to underestimate any opponent in the playoffs.
"We deal with that every year with our division opponents and sometimes it's somewhat similar, it's never exactly the same," he said. "I don't think any team would lose by three or four touchdowns and go 'man that was the way to play them.' But at the same time, everything that you've done over the course of the year -- we always joke when coach says we really don't want any bad plays to start the game -- well you don't know they're going to be bad plays until they're actually bad plays. If you thought it was going to be a bad play going into it, you wouldn't do it, so that's game-planning."
Houston's star running back Arian Foster seemed to echo that sentiment in a recent interview. Foster said he isn't worrying about Houston's loss to the Patriots earlier in the season, that he won't be boning up on footage from that game in preparation for Sunday's game, and thinks the team's upcoming match-up with the Patriots will be an entirely different game, against totally new team.
"They're a new team, we're a new team," Foster said. "Anytime you play a team twice in a season ... you have to attack it differently. It's a different mentality. Different things are at stake."
The Patriots are clearly the favorites to win Sunday's game, but just as Brady said, you'd be a fool to read Shaughnessy's column as gospel. As everyone should know, anything can happen Sunday. Even an upset.
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