NEW YORK -- If you believe the assertion that you can tell how much something really bothers someone by how much they squawk, then the way a couple of former Patriots responded on television this week to a few taunts that former Giants place-kicker Lawrence Tynes tweeted after New England routed the Colts 45-7 in last Sunday's AFC title game was telling.
The Pats have learned to celebrate the hell out of those AFC Championships because the know what comes 2 weeks later. #0-2inGlendale
— Lawrence Tynes (@lt4kicks) January 19, 2015Retired cornerback Ty Law scowled and said, "Who is this dude?"
He's a kicker, Law and former Pats wide receiver Troy Brown were reminded.
"A kicker? Next subject," Law scoffed.
"Don't count. Next subject," Brown agreed.
"Go soak your foot," Law added.
For Tynes, who's built a burgeoning reputation as a Twitter smart aleck since leaving the Giants for Tampa and getting knocked out of the league in 2013 by a serious staph infection, the social media blowback he caught in the first 36 hours after his tweets proved he'd hit a sore spot. Tynes insists, "I actually have great respect for how much winning the Patriots have done, all the division titles they've won" -- even if he did also tweet that "maybe the Pats will have a chance now that they're not playing the G-Men."
Pats supporters and former players don't want any reminders of New York's role in interrupting Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the franchise's coronation as the best NFL coach, quarterback and NFL dynasty of all time.
But hardly any New Yorker who's had something to do with the Giants' upending the Pats' claim to Best Ever, or been stung by Belichick's years of torturing the Jets during their AFC East rivalry, can stop reveling in this latest challenge to the Pats' foothold in history.
"It's true," Tynes said in a phone conversation Wednesday. "It's one of the few times Giants fans and Jets fans pull for the same thing: Whoever is playing the Patriots."
He added: "They could've beaten the Colts with a Frisbee, but they just keep pushing and pushing the [rules] envelope."
And New Yorkers have never let it go.
So while the rest of the country is busy connecting the dots between Spygate and Deflategate, many New Yorkers have never stopped tracing Belichick's ethical squirreliness back, back, back beyond Deflategate, even beyond Spygate, all the way to 1999, when he left the Jets at the altar as reporters were waiting at a news conference for him to be introduced as the Jets' next head coach. Then he gave a rambling, half-hour talk about why, which rivaled John Idzik's 19-minute state-of-the-Jets talk last season for weirdness.
Disdain for Belichick has remained a living, breathing thing for many Jets fans ever since. The fact that it was a Jets coach, Eric Mangini, who completed the Oedipus cycle that Belichick started by jilting his mentor Bill Parcells to go to the Pats, only to see Mangini, his prize pupil, rat him out to the league for spying ... well, that seems too perfect for words.
Without Spygate, Deflategate doesn't take on the added momentum it has. Because one moral breach by Belichick's Pats might be dismissed as an isolated incident. But two, if proved true, looks like a pathology. A pattern.
People close to the Pats also say the long-running dig that their place in history is undermined because Brady and Belichick haven't won a Super Bowl since Spygate did motivate the franchise to erase that stain.
But the Giants' win over the 2007 Pats in Super Bowl XLII, which featured David Tyree's catch, damaged the Pats' invincible reputation. And the Giants' second title win over the Pats in Super Bowl XLVI proved their first upset wasn't a fluke.
The Pats might've survived the second loss and still had their claim to best ever if they'd hung on the first time against the Giants.
Instead, they didn't finish it off with a title and better the '72 Dolphins' 17-0 season by two wins. They didn't surpass the '60s Packers, '70s Steelers or Bill Walsh's '80s San Francisco 49ers. They're not playing now to tie the Steelers' franchise record of six Super Bowl titles overall, and they don't get to brag that they pulled it off in what's generally conceded to be a more difficult era to maintain a dynasty because of the NFL's move to a salary cap.
Consider the personal calculus too: If Belichick were now 5-0 in Super Bowls, rather than 3-0 vs. the rest of the NFL but 0-2 vs. the Giants, Belichick's boosters could argue with near impunity that he'd already eclipsed Walsh, Chuck Noll, even Vince Lombardi (another guy with New York connections), as the NFL's greatest coach of all time.
And Brady would be enjoying the same Greatest of All Time distinction. It'd be said that Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana, Bart Starr and everyone else were now on a lower plateau than him.
"With five trophies, it's not even a conversation," Tynes says.
Brady's murky role in Deflategate hasn't been talked about enough. It's been fascinating to watch the assumptions rage on that Belichick was guilty of deflating the balls rather than Brady, whose humble news conference persona has always been at odds with the smack talking he does on the field.
Belichick continues to get pounded for the deflated balls more, even though story after story has come out explaining it's the starting quarterbacks who get together before games with their team equipment men to work up 12 balls they feel good about playing with. And it's the quarterbacks who obsess over the details. The New York Times reposted this story about the lengths Eli Manning goes to, and the Tampa Bay Tribune exhumed this story about how Brad Johnson admitted paying a few guys $7,500 before Super Bowl XXXVII to secretly make 100 game footballs meet his specs (all legal, Johnson has said). Johnson said he did it because he had trouble gripping the ball in the NFC title game, and he wanted nothing left to chance.
It's pretty inconceivable to think Belichick could undertake something like changing the balls without Brady's knowledge. But it's more believable to think Brady could've done it without Belichick knowing.
Yet it's as if nobody wants to believe a bad thing about "Aw, shucks" Tom. He was asked on his weekly WEEI radio show the day after the Colts game about the deflated balls, and he laughed it off by saying, "I think I've heard it all at this point."
Which isn't exactly a denial.
Now, no matter how or if the NFL eventually punishes the Pats for the deflated balls, the question of the Pats' legacy is in play again for all the wrong reasons.
But in New York, the debate didn't have to be reopened.
Around here -- a place where the Giants, Jets and Belichick have always been connected in a love-hate triangle -- the debate has never really ended.