Top 10 reasons Colts fans hate the Patriots: Revisited
In the buildup to last season’s AFC Championship Game, I wrote “Top 10 reasons Colts fans hate the Patriots.” It went a bit viral. Naturally, it was well-received here in Indianapolis, and not so much in New England.
“Go pick some more corn you backwater know-nothing!”
Dang, they got me. Because apparently all us daggum Hoosiers do is pick corn. But we’ll get to more on Pats fans in a bit.
With this week’s Colts-Patriots game, we decided to update our list, because, well gosh, a lot has happened since then.
10. Even during seasons the Patriots were terrible, they still beat the Colts
From 1990-92, the Patriots had nine wins — total.
Four were against the Colts.
Woof.
9. The Tuck Rule
Before “The Tuck Rule Game,” no one had ever heard of the Tuck Rule. Former Ravens LB Ray Lewis said if not for the Tuck Rule, no one would have known Tom Brady, either. The Patriots won a 2001 AFC divisional playoff game when an apparent Tom Brady fumble was ruled an incompletion due to the Tuck Rule, which says: “Any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body.”
Now an analyst for ESPN, Lewis went on Stephen A. Smith’s radio show and did the unthinkable: He out-shouted Stephen A.
“The first time we created something called a tuck rule, it’s the only reason we know — I’m just being honest — the only reason we know who Tom Brady is, because of a tuck rule. There’s no such thing as a tuck rule! If the ball is in your hand, and I knock it out your hand, whether it’s going backwards, forwards, lateral, sideways, however it’s coming out, that’s a freaking fumble.
“But guess what we created? We created a freaking tuck rule!
“They don’t go to that championship game if that ball is not called a tuck! That’s a fumble! Charles Woodson made that man clearly fumble the ball and they named it the tuck rule, something that we’ve never heard in today’s game. So now you’ve got to ask yourself: When did the legacy really start?”
Preach, Ray. Preach.
8. Mucking up the field in Foxboro
In the 2004 AFC divisional round, the Colts had to travel to New England.
The weather was crappy Monday. It was crappy Tuesday. And again Wednesday. Yet the field remained uncovered. The Patriots had a tarp. They just chose not to use it. Why? It was an obvious ploy to slow the high-powered Colts offense led by Peyton Manning, Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James.
Or that’s how it looked to folks in Indianapolis.
“After two days of stories swirling about the team’s motives, including a photograph Thursday in The Boston Herald that showed mud and a puddle behind one of the end zones, the Patriots’ grounds crew hustled onto the field Thursday afternoon and covered it with a tarp. While a thick mist dampened the air, it was not raining at the time,” wrote the New York Times’ Damon Hack.
“My job is not to pull weeds, or rake the field,” Patriots coach Bill Belichick said. “I have a lot of other things to do.”
(Yeah, like review that pile of secret videos you’ve got in your office, but we’ll get to that.)
Of course it worked. Peyton and the Colts offense managed just 276 total yards and a mere three points in defeat.
7. They signed Reggie Wayne
Seriously? After the offseason acrimony between the two teams, the Patriots went out and trolled Colts Nation by signing one of the franchise’s all-time beloved players.
Luckily for Reggie, his stay in New England was brief (two preseason games). Though on Wayne’s way out the door, former New England QB and blindly ardent Patriots defender Scott Zolak said the former Colts WR wanted out because playing for the Patriots “was too tough and not fun.”
Either that or Reggie’s conscience got the best of him.
6. The New Kids on the Block are Patriots fans
OK, sure Donnie Wahlberg has turned himself into a respectable actor and landed Jenny McCarthy, the girl of my sixth-grade dreams, but he’s not even the most famous Wahlberg.
A year ago, I wrote that Joey McIntyre’s CBS sitcom “The McCarthys” made “2 Broke Girls” look Emmy-worthy. Well, “The McCarthys” was canceled after just 15 episodes. And shockingly, “2 Broke Girls” is still on the air, and actually did win an Emmy for Art Direction. Go figure.
And don’t even get me started on Jordan...
5. "THEY'RE ALL OVER HIM!!!!"
Being an outsider to Indy, I haven’t lived the rivalry like many of you have. So I sent an email to a group of my friends who are Colts fans and asked why they hated the Patriots so much. Many of the responses aren’t fit for print, but one theme kept popping up.
“Manhandling receivers every play since refs won’t call it every play.”
“Holding so much they had to change the rules.”
“Taking so much advantage of defensive holding that they caused an avalanche of rule changes that makes watching football nearly unbearable.”
“Their cheating gets rules to change, i.e. holding.”
So apparently that’s a thing.
4. Willie McGinest's acting job
With a little more than a minute remaining in the 2003 regular-season matchup between Indy and New England, the Colts’ no-huddle offense was firing on all cylinders as it drove toward a potential winning score. Then in an effort to slow Peyton and Co., Patriots LB Willie McGinest played dead on the field.
The veteran linebacker laid on the turf as if JFK’s magic bullet found its way into the RCA Dome. A few plays later, McGinest was tackling Edgerrin James on fourth-and-1 from the New England 2-yard line with 11 seconds left to preserve a Patriots win.
”That was an amazing recovery,” Manning said after the game. ”I thought they should have been penalized for having to stop the clock with no timeouts, but that didn’t go our way either.”
As for McGinest’s take on the play: “I would never fake an injury. I would never fake it and get off the field and miss plays in a game like that. They moved the ball on us, but when it came down to it, we held it down.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, McGinest, now an analyst on NFL Network, has tried his chops in acting. He’s had a few TV show cameos and played Detective Jergins in ’s 2007 biopic “I Tried.”
Yup, Bone has a biopic. Here’s the plot summary via IMDb:
“What if Bone Thugs N harmony never got to audition for Eazy E. What would their outcome have been. This gritty, real tale tells the story of Krayzie, Layzie and Wish and the saga that could’ve happened if they never got that fateful audience with Eazy. Set in Los Angeles in the year 1999 the guys go their separate ways only to have their paths meet one more time in this edgy and gripping drama. “I Tried” is not only a classic song its also a potential state of mind….”
3. Spygate
There’s a reason you call him Belicheat.
In 2007, the Patriots and Belichick incurred the wrath of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell after it was revealed the Patriots had been taping other teams’offensive and defensive signals.
Belichick was fined the maximum $500,000, the largest fine ever imposed on an NFL coach. The Patriots were fined an additional $250,000 and forfeited their first round pick in the 2008 draft.
Former Patriots assistant and then-New York Jets head coach Eric Mangini blew the whistle on the Pats during a game between the two, a decision he said he later regretted.
“Never in a million years did I expect it to play out like this,” Mangini said on ESPN in 2012. “This is one of those situations where I didn’t want them to do the things they were doing. I didn’t think it was any kind of significant advantage, but I wasn’t going to give them the convenience of doing it in our stadium, and I wanted to shut it down. But there was no intent to get the league involved. There was no intent to have the landslide that it has become.”
Former Patriots video assistant Matt Walsh handed over tapes of five teams’ signals. And while the Colts weren’t among them, fans will always be skeptical.
Prior to Spygate, the Patriots won three Super Bowls. They went 10 years without winning another, though that came with its own ___Gate.
2. Their fans
We get it, you win a lot, but don’t pretend it’s all been on the up-and-up. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. Though apparently Patriots fans just keep inhaling because they’ll believe anything that comes from their beloved franchise.
“Mr. McNally is a big fellow and had the opposite goal (as equipment assistant John Jastremski): to lose weight. ‘Deflate’ was a term they used to refer to losing weight.”
Sorry, I just fell out of my chair.
And a review of Gregg Doyel’s Twitter mentions (STILL!) shows a barage of spiteful comments from Patriots fans which will make you shudder for the future of humanity.
1. Tom Brady
Perhaps no player over the years has drawn the ire of Colts fans more than Brady. And Mr. Perfect only added fuel to the fire by, well, cheating.
Prior to last year’s AFC title game, Brady poked fun at Colts fans by posting a photo on Facebook of him riding a Colt. Truth be told, life imitated art as Brady and the Patriots would go on to win 45-7. But alas, that was just the beginning.
What started with a press box phone call from Colts GM Ryan Grigson turned into a 249-day saga that ended in a federal courthouse. Heck, even Bill Nye was asked to examine the scientific validity of the Patriots’ claim weather caused PSI levels to fall in their footballs. Oh yeah, and we learned more than we ever wanted to about PSIs.
Seriously, it was a disaster. From start to finish. We had a destroyed cellphone, Robert Kraft demanding an “umpology” and a text exchange between McNally and Jastremski that rivaled anything Shakespeare penned.
But hey, at least one good thing came out of it all: that wonderful courtroom sketch.
