Patriots Derangement Syndrome

[Agschmid]

Deflategate has sent New England fans over the deep end.

[center][/center]

Ideally, one part of the brain—commonly known as “the understanding”—limits the psychic distortions of sports viewing to a civilized minimum. If my Facebook feed is any indication, the balance between healthy fanaticism and clinical psychosis—on the part of some otherwise nice people—has been tipped in an alarming direction. This is thanks to “deflategate”: the case of the New England Patriots and the allegedly intentional deflation of footballs.

Over the years, Patriots fans have learned to treat every feature of reality as fluid in order to hold two variables—Bill Belichick is the greatest coach who ever lived, and Tom Brady the greatest quarterback—absolutely constant. With the release of the Wells Report—the NFL’s 243-page report laying out the case that footballs were tampered with—the condition has gone code red.

To Pats Nation, “you hate us cause you ain’t us,” or, in English, any criticism of the franchise is sour grapes; the Wells report has been debunked; Spygate was trumped-up nonsense; the fumble statistics indicating the franchise has been advantageously deflating for years are a mess; the Pats would have beaten the Colts anyway; and the team is the victim of a witch hunt. To get a fuller picture of how fandom can bend an otherwise normal psyche in the direction of wishful thinking, selective memory, and situational ethics, let’s look at these claims one by one and in reverse order.

Source.