How do the fuckin’ New England Patriots keep doing it? All the Super Bowl appearances, all the late-game heroics, all the big plays in the clutch … Sixty-five percent winning percentage in the playoffs and an 11-4 record all-time in conference championship games. So what gives. How do you explain it? It’s not luck, it’s actually divine rock & roll intervention …

By me!

We all know that the best way to watch sports is with a cigar in hand and the radio on – tuned to a rock station. This scenario was playing out one Sunday in 2003 while the Patriots were playing a playoff game versus the Colts. This was before Tom Brady boat raced Peyton Manning in the greatest-of-all-time race and there was a lot of talk about who between the two QBs was better. Now, we all respect Manning as an actor, but as a quarterback, well, he’s no Tom Brady. Needless to say, we really wanted Brady to beat Manning. Anyway, the game went to the fourth quarter and the Patriots were winning but they were letting the Colts hang around and I thought to meself, “We need to do something to shake things up here!”

So we played some Black Sabbath, the first album, 1970. We changed the mood with the magic of rock. Adam Vinatieri kicked a field goal, the Patriots defense stiffened and the Pats won 24-14

That started a whole thing. The entire Patriots organization must have felt a jolt at the moment that first Sabbath CD was injected and they probably wondered what it was. Since that day we’ve employed this technique – a wave of Black Sabbath at critical moments of Patriots games – strategically, not wanting to dilute the mojo, never wanting to take this spiritual gift for granted.

Probably the biggest win in the “Sabbath era” came in the 2014 Superbowl. We were in Oregon. The game was not going well but I wasn’t at home, on the road as it were without my Sabbath catalog. The game started to lull us to sleep kind of and at the beginning of the fourth quarter, there was an unspoken acceptance of imminent defeat.

Then I had a John Belushi moment … “Nothing is over until we decide it is! …” There was a turntable, my sons had some Sabbath records. We played Sabbath Bloody Sabbath I think and probably Paranoid. Things started to happen. I remember saying, “Okay, when this side is over someone needs to get up quickly and flip over the record.”

The rest is basically history. Malcolm Butler was possessed by the spirit of Ozzy and the Patriots won the game. Well, I won the game.

It happened again this past Sunday. It looked like the Patriots were gonna handle it on their own but then in the fourth quarter, things started to get sketchy. It looked like they were going to drown so I threw them a lifeline. I played Mob Rules and Ronnie James Dio helped right away and then I played Master of Reality.

How do the Patriots do it you ask? It’s the power of heavy metal … and me.

♦

FOR THE RECORD

A columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote today that “the Patriot Way is just cheating and arrogance.” That’s laughable and pathetically-transparent jealousy. All the Patriots do is compliment opponents, say the right thing (or nothing at all), respect the game and take the high road. Winning is about looking for and taking every possible edge and when the best teams consistently find that edge and create dynasties – the Yankees, the Celtics, the Patriots – the rest of the sports world is first jealous that they weren’t smart enough to find that same edge and then they resort to name calling.

The Patriots went into Kansas City and made 36 first downs to Kansas City’s 18 and gained 524 yards from scrimmage with an old, broken down group of misfits led by a cranky old fuck who continually outsmarts the whole league.

The Los Angeles Times should be better than that, but it isn’t, the latest example of how far the mighty have fallen.

♦

One other thing. Saints fans are butthurt about a pass interference penalty that didn’t get called. The reaction borders on insanity, with calls for the end of the game to be replayed or to change the rules about what types of plays should be reviewable.

Instant replay has always been Pandora’s Box, the powerful genie that can never be put back in the bottle. It’s the devil, pure evil. It changes the game forever in awful ways. In light of this most recent example what’s needed is less replay, not more. Luck and fate and the bounce of the ball and penalties and missed penalties all even themselves out over the course of the game, the course of a season.

Humans are fallible and if we had just accepted that fallibility, if we had just left things alone and accepted that both good calls and bad calls happen, this kind of thing would simply be chalked up the unpredictability of sports.

Coaches’ challenges result in a reversal less than half the time. Reviews take too long. The rules are too complicated. No one can even agree on what the rules are. The constant stopping and starting of the game and the ridiculous debates about the rules and the interpretation of the rules will ultimately kill the game you love.

The ball bounces in funny ways. It all evens out in the end. Make the game simpler, not more complicated.

Photo credit: acase1968 on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND