God...a lot to cover, and little time to do it in...

First, I want to touch on the boneheaded.

James Harrison of the Steelers is an idiot. If you don't want to go to visit the president, fine. Don't tell me it's because if the Cardinals had won that they would have been invited and then go calling the president a fair weather fan because of it. I mean, is he really that ignorant?

Speaking of ignorant - I think that LeBron James ranting about being a competitor rings really hollow as an excuse to not shake hands and to not talk to the press immediately following getting bounced from the playoffs is hollow, immature, and bush league. I could put together a list of people that are extraordinarily competitive that haven't done that - Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Curt Schilling, Pete Rose...the list goes on.

None of those people shied away from the press when they lost, and they understood, as faces of their franchises, that they were expected to act like a leader whether they won, or they were metaphorically kicked in the balls. They knew there was nothing wrong with acknowledging the competition's achievements at their own expense. They may not always say the right things (see Manning's rant about his offensive line a couple of years ago - even if it's accurate, you don't throw teammates under the bus).

On a personal note, I was offended. I'm a very competitive guy. Over the years, since a kid through now I played baseball (little league and college), football (HS, semi-pro), street hockey (8 years), ran track (7 seasons HS and college), soccer (youth, HS, college), martial arts (25 years), and Australian football (10 seasons). In that time I was involved with some absolutely dominant teams (in all six HS seasons of track the team I ran on either outright won or tied for the league championship in every season), and some absolute dogs (in two seasons of division 3 college baseball I played for a team that went 2-18. We lost to teams such as the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy...yes, we lost to future pharmacists).

I'm not saying that people should be happy about losing. In no way, shape or form am I saying that. But there's nothing wrong with congratulating someone on beating your brains in. Nothing wrong at all in acknowledging that you and your team were outplayed.

Other quick thoughts...

Right now, based on recent starts, the Sox rotation, in regards to the importance of what the starters are doing for them looks like this -

Josh Beckett
Brad Penny
Tim Wakefield
Jon Lester
Daisuke Matsuzaka

For the last month Beckett has been the ace that they had two seasons ago. Hopefully that lasts.

Penny, for all the talk about trading him before the deadline, has been the team's most consistent starter, outside of Beckett since the end of April. Until they have a sure-thing number-two starter, Penny has made himself near indispensable in the Sox rotation.

Overall, Wakefield has been the Sox best starter, but for the last month he's been a little erratic. Yes, he carried the rotation in April, but with two tough starts in the last month, Wake has fallen to the middle of the rotation. Still, assuming he stays healthy, he's on pace to win fifteen or more games this season.

Lester has been a crap shoot all season long. One start he'll be absolutely dominating and look like he's turned the corner, the next he'll get lit up for seven runs in four innings. If he can put together more than two good starts back to back, well, let's just say that would be a nice change and a good place to start.

I just can't put Matsuzaka any higher than fifth in this list, in spite of Lester's struggles. For all of Lester's problems, he's still averaging six innings per start. Matsuzaka has managed to pitch into the sixth inning in only one of his starts and has averaged 4.1 innings per start. Only once in his five starts has he given up fewer than three earned runs. Yes, his last start was encouraging, but he's still at the bottom of the pile right now.

Finally (regarding the Red Sox), I'm not buying into the Renaissance of Jason Varitek. Yes, he's putting up decent numbers (he's on pace for about 30 home runs and 66 RBI), but at the end of May last year 'Tek was batting .272 through 46 games. At the time he was on pace for 20 home runs and 60 RBI. The remainder of the season he batted .191 and finished with 13 homeruns and 43 RBI. For the final two-thirds of the season he hit all of six home runs and had 23 runs driven in. When the weather got hot, 'Tek's bat cooled off.

That wasn't a complete fluke. In 2007 'Tek hit .245 for the balance of the season after hitting .277 for the first two months of that season. Overall the Sox catcher finished on pace for homeruns (he was on pace for 15 and finished with 17) but off the pace for RBI (he was on pace for 78, but finished with 68). Sure, that last one wasn't a huge difference, but it is an illustration of Varitek's drop off in production during warmer weather in each of the last couple of seasons.

My guess is that his bat cools off over the next couple of months and he finishes around .220 with under 50 RBI and between 15 and 20 HR. I just hope I'm wrong.

The last thing I wanted to touch on...

All the reports out of Foxboro are that Tom Brady is moving well in OTA's.

My guess is that Brady will see some significant time in at least one, if not two of the preseason games for two reasons. The coaching staff is going to want him to shake off the rust of a season off, and more importantly, to see how he reacts to bodies around him. Watch him step up in the pocket, avoid the rush, see if the knee is in his head, so to speak.

If he comes through with flying colors, it could be a very interesting season for the Pats.

Offensively this team broke a ton of records two seasons ago. Both Randy Moss and Wes Welker were in their first year in the system. That included playing the team's final seven games all in cold/bad weather locations after mid-November.

Is the offense going to be as good? Probably not - 2007 was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of season, but an argument can be made to expect big things.

Moss and Welker are in their third season in the system. Brady has a season of rest. His third and fourth options with Joey Galloway and Greg Lewis (not to mention Sam Aiken) are better than what he had then. He should have a healthy stable of running backs going into the season - also better than they were then with the addition of Fred Taylor and the return of a healthy Laurence Maroney, along with Sammy Morris and Kevin Faulk.

If the O-line stays healthy, they could still put up big numbers.

On top of all that, I firmly believe that the defense has upgraded with Leigh Bodden and Shawn Springs on the corners, and mind you this is merely a guess, but I would put odds on the Patriots signing the recently released Greg Ellis to bolster the linebacking corps which I think is going to get a boost from a healthy Shawn Crable anyway. The defense's big problem is that a number of the players in the second level are new to the system. If they come together, this defense has the potential to be one of the best of the Belichick era.

Of course all of this is contingent upon being healthy. A hard thing in the NFL.

And a final Patriot note -

Happy trails Rodney Harrison. I'm looking forward to your career as an analyst.

Blame and team dynamics

It was a good win for the Colts on Sunday night. They did enough to win, and the Pats did just enough to lose.

There was plenty of blame to go around; Jabar Gaffney, Randy Moss, Dave Thomas, Bill Belichick.

Gaffney dropped a sure touchdown pass.

Moss ran a route half speed in the last offensive series when he had drawn one on one coverage, and then cut his route off early, as though he couldn't outrun the corner that was so far down on the Colts depth chart that the man was a player without a team earlier in the season.

Dave Thomas had possibly the biggest boneheaded play of all on a drive that might have ended up compensating for Belichick's earlier blunders, committing a personal foul after the play to turn a third and inches into a third and fifteen.

But some of the other things would never have played into it had Belichick not engaged in some brutally bad choices - the penalty challenge was poor because it really didn't take very long for me to establish with TiVo that not only there were only 11 players on the field, but the one that the Pats coaches mistook for the 12th guy running off the field was player 11. The coaches up in the box should have been able to determine that inside of ten to fifteen seconds.

Then with 11 minutes left Belichick second guessed himself on a fourth down sneak which worked, but the refs granted Bill the timeout and the play didn't count. Belichick eschewed four more chances at the end-zone for the tie. It somehow felt like the Ravens game last season with the Pats in the roll of the Ravens.

The difference in the game - the Colts didn't make the stupid choices - clock mismanagement, personal fouls, drops at key moments. That was all on the Patriots, and it was the difference in the game.

On the plus side, there are some bright spots to take from the game, some of which Peter King noted in his TMQB article where he talked to former Giants coach Jim Fassel -

• JIM FASSEL ON PATS-COLTS. Fassel did the 18-15 Indy win on Westwood One radio the other night, and he loved the game. "Great, great game,'' he said. "You think without [Tom] Brady the rivalry would really suffer, but you can't see a much better game than that one. New England has four 12-play-plus drives. Indianapolis has Manning playing for their season. Either team could have won.

"People thought the Patriots were dead with Matt Cassel playing, but I remember when Brady came in that first year [2001], and he was scrambling and dinkin' and dunkin.' Same philosophy now. Same gameplan. And in this game, I saw stuff out of Cassel I didn't see when I did the Patriots against San Diego a couple of weeks ago. He drops back, and on his fifth step, bang, he hits a receiver right between the numbers with authority. New England will be a tough team to beat in the playoffs.''

And onto team dynamics...

Humans are instinctively pack animals. I have believed this for a long time. We have this need to belong to a group, to something larger than ourselves. I've always felt this was at the root of why we root for sports teams, and we even identify with them using pronouns such as "we," and "my." There is almost always an "us against them" mentality for the fan bases, and it definitely exists within the teams themselves.

It's an instinct that both brings people together and one that pits them against each other.

I bring this up because there's something about fan and team dynamics that's applicable to politics. Historically, political races are run less on the actual issues than they have been run with the philosophy of tearing down the opponent. The us against them mentality is pervasive -

Republicans are fascist pinheads and religious nut jobs.

Democrats are commie pinko socialists bent on the destruction of the American Way.

Republicans are book-banning Nazis.

Democrats can't keep the nation safe.

For my money, it's all boneheaded, but as boneheaded as it was, we saw something new work this election. McCain used the Karl Rove playbook and got badly burned. Hillary Clinton did everything in the primaries that she could to tear down Barack Obama, and it ended up burning her.

Obama, while not total innocent of the "look what they're doing/ they have done" mentality in his advertising campaigns, his general message was that we needed to come together as a nation. He actually avoided some of the issues that could have reflected negatively on McCain which included -

For all of McCain's bluster about Ayers, McCain accepted donations and public endorsements from Leonore Annenberg and Arnie Weber - two individuals who also have ties to Ayers. Both individuals donated the maximum allowable amount to McCain's campaign, and both were involved in the approval of the grant Ayers' foundation received from the Annenberg Foundation. Does this make McCain a terrorist? Certainly not.

Palin, while mayor in Wasilla, asked the librarian how she would go about banning books from the shelves of the public library. She tried to fire the librarian when the same librarian gave Palin the answer that she couldn't.

Little was made of McCain's links to the Iran-Contra affair by the campaign.

Nothing was made about McCain's comments that we supported freedom fighters in Afghanistan back in the 1980's. Considering they were called the Taliban then, were trained by the Republican regime then in place, and had a member of that "freedom fighter" group by the name of Osama bin Laden - it was a comment that Obama could have jumped all over.

This is just the short list.

And please, don't mistake - I'm registered as an independent, have voted for Republicans, Democrats, Green Party, and any number of other candidates. My issue isn't with Republicans, per se. I have issues with party politics and the politics of partisanship and I cast my vote based on what I feel is the competence of the candidate.

What I think is interesting to note here is that while McCain tried scare tactics in regards to executive experience (he has virtually none as well), past associates (he has some pretty shady associates as well - I didn't even mention the Keating Five), incorrectly linking his opponent to a political philosophy that Obama doesn't actually espouse, Obama stayed on message - stressing in stump speeches the need to come together as a nation. I'm not naive enough to believe that this heralds a new day in campaign strategy. I just think the variables just came together for a guy who organized an impressive campaign.

And that's really the bottom line in sports and in politics - the people who win are the ones who run the best campaigns - and from early on McCain stumbled, Obama didn't - and like with the Pats-Colts game, the guy who made the fewest mistakes won.