Though it took charges of plagiarism and ethical lapses to force Ron Borges to leave the Boston Globe, the veteran football/boxing scribe’s intense devotion to baiting Bill Belichick never resulted in punitive measures from his former employer. Now ensconced at the Boston Herald, Borges is in midseason form, saying of the Patriots’ preseason training facility, “the huge images of Mike Vrabel, Richard Seymour], Ty Law, Adam Vinatieri, Deion Branch, Asante Samuel [stats] and so many others of the past have been taken down…they have been expunged in the same way deposed Russian leaders used to disappear from the history books of Moscow™s children.”
They did the same thing in Green Bay after the passing of Lombardi™s Packers. They took down the pictures after the stars left and said, œCreate your own identity, but the weight of the past was too much. The Pack didn™t win another Super Bowl for 29 years.
Today, the grass looks great, the locker room smells great, the players are great and the kiddie corps of assistant coaches Bill Belichick has surrounded himself with are budding geniuses, not the underpaid lab assistants many of them appear to be.
Belichick has seized the motivational moment for his young players by expunging as much of the Patriots™ history from the walls as he can to tell his players this team has done nothing. Those teams were champions, but what are you?
It™s a good point, but not a totally encouraging one because one could ask the same of the highest-paid coach in pro football. Bill Belichick was a genius once, when the players in the photos were still active.
Truth be told the Patriots not only haven™t won the Super Bowl in six years they haven™t won it since Law left . . or Charlie Weis . . . or Romeo Crennel, for that matter. When we last saw Belichick on the sideline, nobody looked too smart as the Baltimore Ravens were trampling his team on its home field in the playoffs, a loss owner Robert Kraft has called œembarrassing so many times it™s, well, embarrassing.