FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) -The Patriots and Jets are at it again.
The AFC East rivals meet Sunday for the first time since the NFL penalized New England $750,000 and a first-round draft pick for illegal sideline videotaping. But the animosity between them didn’t start with Spygate, and it won’t end when the two coaches – former friends and colleagues – meet at midfield for the perfunctory postgame handshake.
“I hate it when people say, ‘Well, this one is really going to mean something.’ Like the other 13 (games) didn’t mean anything?” Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said Wednesday. “We put everything into it that we can every week, so I hope that we go out there and play the best game of the year.”
But for a team that has rarely been challenged this season, winning its first 13 games and approaching some of the NFL’s most hallowed records, the game against the Jets offers something extra. The spying scandal did more than punish the Patriots and coach Bill Belichick; it also tarnished the three Super Bowl titles they’ve already won.
New England has already shown it can blow out opponents. Add in a little bit of revenge and the results could be historic – oddsmakers originally established the Patriots as a 27-point favorite, a record for an NFL game that doesn’t involve replacement players. The line has gone down a bit since.
“It’s a passionate rivalry, and you enjoy the games. There’s a lot of intensity on both sides and that’s what you expect going into it,” Mangini said. “All the external things are things you can’t focus on and can’t look at because there’s so much other work to do that’s going to affect the outcome.”
The rivalry between the Patriots and Jets might not be as old as Boston and New York, but Belichick was asked about a brawl between them in the 1970s.
“In the ’70s?” he said with a smile. “Let’s talk about that. I bet everybody’s interested in that, something that happened 40 years ago.”
He’s right: Why bother with the old stuff when there’s been plenty of coach-swapping and draft pick forfeiture in the last decade to make the case for a serious grudge?
And Belichick has been in the middle of a lot of it.
He was the coach-in-waiting when Bill Parcells tried to finagle his way out of his contract to leave the Patriots for the Jets right after – and perhaps even before – the 1997 Super Bowl. Running back Curtis Martin followed him to New York as a free agent a year later.
Belichick squirmed in the spotlights when he bailed out after one day as the H.C. of the N.Y.J., then surfaced as the Patriots’ new coach. For the second time, the commissioner got involved and draft picks were paid as compensation for the coach poaching.
Parcells tried to tamp down the animosity by proclaiming “this kind of border war between the Patriots and Jets needed to come to a halt.”
But it was years before he and Belichick were hanging out together again, leaving reporters to analyze every postgame handshake and every pregame news conference where they conspicuously forgot to mention the other by name. (Parcells declined to be interviewed for this story through a spokesman at ESPN, where he works as an analyst.)
Now, it’s Belichick and Mangini who aren’t returning each other’s calls.
Mangini joined the Patriots along with Belichick in 2000 and was the defensive coordinator in New England for his final year there before he left to take the top job with the Jets in 2006. Belichick reportedly was bothered that Mangini tried to bring Patriots assistants with him, and the Patriots filed tampering charges against the Jets during receiver Deion Branch’s holdout.
The Jets have brought in several former Patriots players, including Bobby Hamilton, Matt Chatham, Tim Dwight, Hank Poteat.
Still, Mangini speaks highly of Belichick.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for him and he’s done a lot for me and my career and nothing has changed from the first time that we played them,” Mangini said.
Asked if he thought there would even be a postgame handshake, Mangini said, “I don’t expect to do anything outside the norm that I do every game with every head coach that I play against.”
The two had a quick embrace last year after the Patriots beat the Jets 37-16 in the playoffs, though the moment was sort of spoiled when Belichick shoved a Boston Globe photographer aside in the process.
“The handshakes and the high-fives and all that,” Belichick said dismissively. “Right now my attention is on the New York Jets, and that’s really all I’m thinking about, is how I can prepare our team to the best of my ability to prepare for the game and play it on Sunday. … High-fives, I really haven’t thought too much about that.”
Pressed on whether there was any personal aspect to the game, Belichick turned serious.
“It’s the next game. It’s a division game,” he said. “Everything that’s in the past is in the past. Everything that’s in the future doesn’t really matter. Right now it’s a one-game season (and) we’re focused on the New York Jets. That’s all I’m focused on. And I’m happy to talk about that, and that’s really about the extent of it.”
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