The New England Patriots, 4-0 this season and looking unbeatable, may actually just be too good to go undefeated. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out.
So far this season, the Pats are absolutely decimating their opponents, totally dominating the game on both sides of the ball. Quarterback Tom Brady is leading the league in touchdown passes (13) and completion percentage (79.2). With New England's crushing Monday night victory over the offensively dangerous and pass-happy Cincinnati Bengals, Brady became just the third player in NFL history to throw three or more touchdowns in each of the first four games of a season. Wide receiver Randy Moss seems to be open every single time Brady looks for him, and the draft-day acquisition leads the league with seven TD receptions. The Pats' running game isn't half bad either. The team is averaging 157 rushing yards per game, good enough for fourth in the NFL. On Monday, Sammy Morris, the second-string running back, rushed for 117 yards, including 98 in the first half, and one touchdown.
The New England D has been equally ruthless to opposing teams. It leads the league in average yards allowed at 226 and has surrendered just 48 points to opponents through four games. On Monday, the Pats' secondary limited Pro Bowl receiver and touchdown-celebrator extraordinaire Chad Johnson to just 53 yards on three catches. The defensive unit held the Bengals, who racked up 45 points in week two against the surprisingly respectable Cleveland Browns, to just 13 points.
The Pats' lethal one-two punch of an explosive offense and a shut-down defense has meant that their games are often decided before the fourth quarter (and sometimes the third) even starts, much to the chagrin, I'm sure, of CBS and ESPN. They've beaten their opponents thus far by margins of 24, 24, 31 and 21. None of these games has been anywhere close enough to force even a hint of worry into the Golden Boy's pretty little head. When a team is winning all its games by at least three touchdowns, it's really not fair.
Now there's been a lot of talk the past few days, and not just by the talking heads on SportsCenter but also by some uber-confident (some might say obnoxious) Patriots fans around campus about the team going 16-0 in the regular season. "Who can beat us?" they all say. But finishing a 16-game season with a zero in the loss column is a truly remarkable, perhaps superhuman, feat that has yet to be accomplished. (The 1972 Miami Dolphins, the last team to go undefeated, played just 14 regular season games.)
Winning week in and week out, especially on the road, has proven practically impossible, no matter how good the team. An unlucky muffed punt or tipped pass-turned-interception return for a touchdown can turn the complexion of a game on its head and a win into a loss. Those fluke plays are the types of things teams cannot game plan for.
It's not like the Pats' schedule is a cakewalk either. To go undefeated, they've got to go on the road and beat both the Dallas Cowboys and Indianapolis Colts, two similarly dominant teams that are also 4-0.
Now, let's assume - and this is a big assumption - that the Pats do manage to make it to 13-0, or maybe even 14-0. Based on the rest of the AFC East's performance so far, the odds are that by that point in the season New England will have wrapped up its division and a playoff berth. The Bills, Jets and Dolphins are all at least three games back of the Pats (after just four games, mind you) and are playing abysmally for the most part. All three, just like the Pats, have to contend with the entire NFC East as well as the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Colts. Oh, and did I mention that each of these bottom-of-the-barrel teams has to play the Pats twice? The bottom line is that none of them are going to even come close to challenging the Pats for the division title. It's also very likely that by week 14 or 15 the Pats will have clinched home-field advantage for the entire postseason.
In 2005, Tony Dungy, coach of a Colts team that was widely predicted to go undefeated and was just as dominant as the Pats are now, wisely sat many of his starters for most of the final two games of the season. Guaranteed that his team would win its division, earn the number one seed and play at home for the entirety of the playoffs, Dungy knew there was no point in exposing his star players to the significant risk of serious injury that exists in every single play in the NFL. With backup quarterback Jim Sorgi taking the majority of the snaps for Peyton Manning, the Colts, not surprisingly, finished the season by losing two of three after starting 13-0.
Coach Bill Belicheat - excuse me, Belichick (that's an issue for another column) would prove himself, in addition to being a shameless swindler (ok, I promise, this will be my last gratuitous reference to Spygate in this column), to be shamefully moronic and misguided were he to play Brady, Moss, Laurence Maroney, Tedy Bruschi and the rest in games that, essentially, would not matter. In the NFL, what really matters is the Lombardi Trophy and those rings.
Yes, becoming the first team to go undefeated in the regular season in 35 years would be quite an accomplishment, but it certainly wouldn't be worth a season-ending injury to your star quarterback in week 17 and a subsequent loss in your first playoff game.
Alex Mazerov '10 thinks his IM soccer team can go undefeated.
