Love 'Em or Hate 'Em, People Watch the Patriots

Watching the New England Patriots win is nothing new to football followers. They won three Super Bowls in four years between the 2001 and 2004 seasons and have been in the playoffs for six of the last seven years.

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But the feeling is different this year, as Coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady pursue a fourth Super Bowl title together and the Patriots try to join the 1972 Miami Dolphins as the only teams to go through a season unbeaten. The Patriots, who some call the best football team ever, have become villains. They began the season mired in a cheating scandal and since have been accused of embarrassing opponents by running up the score.

"To a lot of people," said David Carter, the executive director of the sports business institute at the University of Southern California, "they stand for some of the things that are lacking in sports."

Having escaped Baltimore on Monday night with a 27-24 win over the Ravens -- the most watched cable program in television history -- the Patriots, now 12-0, play the 9-3 Pittsburgh Steelers in Foxborough, Mass., today in what might be the most challenging game left on their schedule. They finish with home games against the New York Jets (3-9) and winless Dolphins before a season finale at the Meadowlands against the New York Giants (8-4).

The Patriots weren't always the team everybody loves to hate. When they won their first Super Bowl on Feb. 3, 2002, with an upset over the St. Louis Rams, they were a plucky underdog. They took the field en masse instead of having players introduced individually, and what could have been better than having a franchise named the Patriots win the first Super Bowl after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks?

Belichick was a curmudgeon, but in a non-menacing way. There was something oddly cool about an Xs-and-Os genius of a coach who wore such intentionally anti-glamorous hooded sweatshirts and was pals with rocker Jon Bon Jovi. Brady was the fresh-faced 199th pick in the 2000 NFL draft made good.

Patriots owner Robert Kraft built one of the most successful brands in the NFL, with the franchise's value being estimated by Forbes magazine this year at just less than $1.2 billion. Belichick and front-office chief Scott Pioli were so skilled at crafting rosters filled with inexpensive players that the Patriots didn't have to spend too much of Kraft's money to win championships. They were truly the model NFL franchise.

Now they're a renegade team, at least in the minds of many fans in the other 31 NFL cities. The biggest blow to their image came when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell fined Belichick $500,000 and the Patriots $250,000 and stripped the team of a first-round draft pick next spring for using videotaping equipment to steal the play signals of the New York Jets' coaches in the opening game of the season at Giants Stadium. The episode became known as "SpyGate" and created an uproar, with some contending that Belichick should have been suspended. Don Shula, the coach of the undefeated '72 Dolphins, even suggested that the Patriots' record might deserve an asterisk in the record books if they go unbeaten.

The Patriots have become the modern-day equivalent of the old Oakland Raiders, whose owner, Al Davis, popularized the phrase, "Just win, baby."

Said former Raiders coach John Madden, "We led the league in boos."

The longtime broadcaster, now with NBC, recalled in a recent conference call with reporters that he would tell his players just before they were to take the field for a road game that he didn't know if they would be cheered or booed. Then, he said, he'd add: "If they boo you, they respect you and they're afraid of you. If they cheer you, they don't respect you and they're not afraid of you."