Foul Territory

It's been said that the New England Patriots of recent years are similar to the late 90's New York Yankees. I wrote a little bit about this in my other blog, but I thought I'd give it a more detailed treatment here on my sports blog.

First off, we need to get some things out of the way. Boston fans absolutely hate it when people say the Yankees are similar to the Patriots. This mostly stems from 86 years of watching the Yankees with 26 World Series in between Red Sox championships. To your average Boston fan, the Yankees represent everything wrong with sports, even if secretly they would give their collective right arm to trade places. As such, it is difficult to talk to a Boston fan about the similarities, because all they hear is, "blah blah Patriots blah blah blah blah Yankees blah blah." Getting past this is the first step to a rational conversation. If the St. Louis Rams were in the position of being compared to the Yankees, you can bet there wouldn't be such an outcry in Missouri.

Starting with the players, you can see similarities between the two teams. Winning in any team sport requires players to focus on winning as a team and working together to achieve that goal. It also helps if you're able to use homegrown players complemented by free agent veterans when necessary. Both teams have made use of this model, though the Yankees have been working with a higher payroll compared to the rest of the league. Where you see some similarities is what happens to players when they join each team. The Patriots have a lot of players that were not nearly as good else where as they have become with the Patriots. Rodney Harrison and Mike Vrabel are two that come to mind. For the Yankees, you have players like Scott Brosius, who was a nice player, but nothing like the star he became for a short while in the Big Apple. Vrabel went from hardly playing in Pittsburgh to starting at linebacker for a three time Super Bowl champion. Both teams also have had a good complement of homegrown talent. New England has Tom Brady, Stephen Neal, and Troy Brown, among others, while the Yankees can counter with Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada. Again, there are some differences due partly to the economic might afforded teams playing in the country's largest media market as well as the lack of a salary cap in baseball. These differences manifest themselves in the high profile free agents that New York is able to attract on an almost yearly basis by offering contracts that would surely become salary cap casualties in the NFL. On the other hand, the Patriots have more flexibility in their dealings than the Yankees due to the lack of guaranteed contracts. If Jason Giambi were a football player, he'd have been cut months ago (and replaced by Don Mattingly, if the latest Yankee moves are a trend, but that's another story).

Additionally, Tom Brady is Derek Jeter. I can't take credit for this comparison (hats off to Aaron at Football Outsiders), but it seems valid to me, though it must drive Bostonians crazy to see this comparison between their All-American Tom with the face of all they despise. Each player is a homegrown, good looking, outgoing team leader who does not typically have the stats of the best players at his position (there have been exceptions to this for each player; Brady in 2004 and Jeter in 1999), yet the media and (some) fans revere him as the best at his position if not the best player in the league. I can't remember who or where, but I saw something on the web where a writer argued for Jeter as 2004 MVP. Also, Tim McCarver can't go five minutes without talking about how great Jeter is, even as he misses another ground ball up the middle, and I've seen in more than one place Tom Brady annointed as the best quarterback to ever play the game, even though he's only in his fourth season as a starter. Both players also have a tendency to date celebrities. To me, this comparison is the closest between the Patriots and Yankees.

There are also some coaching similarities. Each team is considered to have a top notch head man, though that means different things in each sport. In football, it's tactical skill and motivation that is important, while Joe Torre's main strengths are dealing with his owner (more on the Boss later) and juggling the players' egos. What each coach has done, whether on his own or with help from management, is assemble some good talent around him. Willie Randolph has found his way to a managerial position after a number of tries. Mel Stottlemyre has been effective, if not Leo Mazzone, and Don Zimmer is a former Manager of the Year (1989). For the Patriots, everyone keeps calling Bill Belichick a genius, and his defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel was just hired to coach the Cleveland Browns while his offensive coordinator Charlie Weis has been given one of the most prestigious jobs in all of college sports as he heads to the Golden Dome to try to recapture lost glory for Notre Dame. Though there are differences between the two teams, the overriding theme is competence in coaching.

The owners are a point where there is the largest difference, in my estimation. To my knowledge, Robert Kraft has never been banned by the commisioner (for the Dave Winfield incident) or kicked off the executive council or suspended following illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon. Additionally, Steinbrenner has been angling for a new publicly funded stadium for his team, while Robert Kraft built Gillette Stadium with entirely private funds. Kraft seems to take a lower profile in the day to day football operations than his counterpart in the Bronx. He allows his football people to pick the players, while Steinbrenner seems unable to allow Brian Cashman the freedom to build a team on his own. He is, to his credit, desperate to win and willing to take drastic measures to keep his team on top.

Obviously any analogy breaks down eventually, but I think that the comparison of the Yankees' and Patriots' recent runs of success is an apt one. The next few years will be telling, especially if the Patriots next few seasons look anything like the the last four title-less years for the Yankees. Players will wnat bigger contracts and coaches will move on. Will the Patriots be able to sustain this run of excellence, or is the window about to close?