A point of contention;Defense still wins championships
FOXBORO - The trading of Randy Moss and the return of Deion Branch has led many to claim The Great Cancer has been cut away and the Patriots have returned to their past. If that's the case they should have re-acquired Mike Vrabel, Asante Samuel and Richard Seymour, not Branch.
While it has become popular sport to blame the Patriots' failure to win another Super Bowl the past six years on the offense, the truth is the opposite is the case. In the three Super Bowl-winning seasons with Tom Brady at starting quarterback, the team went 10-5 in games in which it scored 19 points or less. Since that last Super Bowl victory six years ago the Pats are 7-17 in games in which they scored 19 points or less.
Lost their soul or lost their defense?
In 2007, the Patriots had only one game in which they scored 19 points or less. They lost that game. It was Super Bowl XLII.
Since then, they are 4-9 in such games, again losing two of every three. That's not because, as someone around here loves to holler, ''The offense STINKS!'' It's because the defense isn't close to what it was and neither Randy Moss nor Deion Branch could do a thing about that.
If one looks at the Indianapolis Colts one finds a similar circumstance. Although people in these parts loved blaming Peyton Manning for Indianapolis' failures against the Patriots during the local team's Super Bowl years, the fact is the Colts are 16-27 in games decided by 19 points or fewer since 2001 but 3-3 in the two years they reached the Super Bowl. Take out those two years and the Colts are 10-21 in games in which they scored 19 points or less during what could be called the Brady-Manning era. Lo and behold, the Colts lost two of every three such games and won no titles, just like guess who?
So for all the noise being made on radio and television these days about how Moss' arrival caused the Patriots to ''lose their soul'' and how he made them get away from ''playing Patriot football'' the problem was and remains that the defense has slipped through aging and unwise drafting to the point where it: A) struggles to hold a lead; B) needs to be propped up by the offense far more often than is healthy if a championship is the goal.
Truth be told, ''playing Patriot football'' was always more about defense than offense. It was about running a smartly risk-averse offense. But one cannot do that if the risk is your defense won't hold up in close games.
As the Colts have amply proven; as the ''Greatest Show On Turf'' St. Louis Rams have amply proven; as the K-Gun Buffalo Bills have amply proven, you don't often win championships scoring points. You win them by stopping the other team from scoring points.
That's how the Patriots won in 2001, '03 and '04 when they went 10-5 with Brady leading the offense on days it scored 19 points or less. It's how they've lost since, going 7-17 in such games since that last championship victory and 4-9 since last returning to the Super Bowl.
By the way, if you think those facts change by pushing it up to 20 points, they do not. Nineteen just seemed to serve as a line of offensive demarcation.
Now it may be more titillating to blame Brady, Moss and the offense for the disappointments, such as they've been, of the past five-plus seasons. But the truth is they didn't lose their soul when Moss arrived and didn't find it when Branch returned.
The ''soul'' of their Super Bowl seasons was their defense. If you're going to lose two out of every three times when you score less than 20 points you're not going to win many championships because, if you think about it, isn't that what really separates champions from the rest of the pack?
In these parts we used to say ''defense wins championships'' because the Patriots had one and the Colts didn't. Now it's not that way so the mumbling heads say the offense has lost its soul and can't score in the second half (do those points count more?) and can't score ''when it counts'' (last time I looked, whenever you scored counts). The truth is the defense seldom holds up in a close game.
This year's Patriots, with or without Moss, will win most of the track meets. But champions win the bulk of the dogfights, too. And dogfights in football are most often won with stout defenses that don't go 7-17 when points are hard to come by.
- rborges@bostonherald.com