After the Patriots 11-5 season without quarterback Tom Brady, high hopes prevail for the 2009 season in New England. The Patriots were just one win away from playing in the playoffs, and the way the playoffs are going, New England may have won the darn thing!
We are excited for next season! Hope to see a healthy Brady and the Pats back and dominating!

Tis the season for treason.You know, switching your NFL allegiance.

That’s what you’re faced with when the National Football League leaves you a lump of coal for the playoffs: your team sitting where you sit — on the couch, watching digital images, a drink in one hand, a sheet of college prospects in the other.

But die-hard fans — the ones who love mouthpiece-jarring tackles and 50-yard flea-flickers, along with reasons to eat, drink and watch sports — know that if you want to make the three remaining NFL weekends worthwhile, you pick a team each week and you go with it.

Sometimes, it’s the underdog. Sometimes, it’s your dad’s team.

Or sometimes, it’s your bartender’s squad.

That’s what New England Patriots fans at Cim’s Tavern have vowed to do since their beloved Patriots failed to make the playoffs for the first time since the 2002 season.

The Bill Belichick-coached squad finished 11-5 this season, becoming the first team with that record to miss the playoffs since the Denver Broncos in 1985.

“We’re supporting our favorite bartender now,” said Mark Kerwood, 67, a retired telephone company employee and a Cim’s regular.

Kerwood said Danny Reddy, Cim’s Sunday bartender, is a fervent Carolina Panthers fan. In the back of his car sits a stuffed Panther. Each week, he sticks a stuffed animal, in the likeness of the Panthers’ opponent,

into the stuffed Panther’s mouth.On Saturday night, it was a Cardinal.

The regulars said they were getting behind Reddy’s team because he’s a good guy, their team is out of it, and “it gets us good service,” Kerwood said.

It helps that most Patriots fans “hate the Giants.”

That’s the Giants, as in New York, the team that beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl last year.

“They can’t lose by enough points,” Kerwood said. “Anyone who plays the Giants is automatically our team. So Philadelphia is also our team this week (today).”

In an informal poll conducted on The Eagle’s Web site last week, 30 percent of respondents said they weren’t interested in the playoffs since the Patriots were out. Nearly 40 percent said they remained interested.

New England missed the playoffs despite winning its final four games behind Matt Cassel, who took over for star quarterback Tom Brady after Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury during the first game of the season.

With the Patriots gone, Rich Asher, 48, owner of the Sideline Saloon, said he noticed that the crowd at his bar last week during Round 1 of the NFL playoffs paid less attention and was quieter than usual.

“If the Pats were on, it would’ve been a lot louder,” Asher said.

Like many in the Berkshires, Sideline patron Pete LaChapelle, 52, a U.S. Postal Service employee, is a fan of both the NFC’s Giants and the AFC’s Patriots. He’s been a Giants fan since 1962 and a Patriots fan from “the early 1980s.”

“The Giants are my NFC team, so I’m definitely rooting for them,” he said. “You gotta pick a team in the playoffs. It’s more football. Who doesn’t like more football?”

That’s the same sentiment uttered by Pierre Mercier, 62, a retired truck mechanic and a Patriots fan.

Is he bummed that the Patriots fell short this season?

“Yes,” he said. “But I’m not going to crawl under my bed and cry. Everybody usually finds a team in the postseason and gets behind them. Maybe it’s because of a player or a good story, or an underdog.

“Hey, you wouldn’t enjoy the playoffs if you didn’t root for somebody.”

Matt Cassell has done just fine filling out for All American STUD Tom Brady. Sure, the Patriots aren’t 14-0, but at 9-5 and tied for the lead in the AFC East, New England is doing JUST fine. The Patriots still have a shot at making the playoffs even without Brady in the lineup. With games left with Arizona and Buffalo – win both and the Patriots are IN! Sure the Jets hold the tiebreaker, and the Dolphins are red hot. But win both games, and playoff bound!!!

Now don’t get us wrong, we want Tom Brady back in 2009, but 2008 hasn’t been THAT bad, has it!?!?

The good news for our boy Tom Brady – he is back in Patriots camp working out! What great news! We love to hear our man Brady is going to come back and ready to dominate. Until then, it’s time for the Patriots to get themselves some more wins!

Tom Brady is back in Foxborough working out in the New England Patriots training room.

New England’s star quarterback has undergone two surgeries on his left knee that was injured in the opener against Kansas City, ending his season. He has battled an infection that set in after the operation, which was done in the Los Angeles area.

Brady has been in Foxborough for at least a week and his teammates are happy to see him. Running back Kevin Faulk said Tuesday that Brady is “doing good.” Defensive end Jarvis Green said it was good to see Brady hanging around and smiling.

Matt Cassel is no longer just the caretaker for Tom Brady’s team.The former New England backup broke out with the best game of his career Thursday night, passing for 400 yards and running for another 62 in an overtime loss to the New York Jets. He also flashed a little of the Brady style, leading the Patriots’ offense to touchdowns in the final minutes of both halves in regulation.

“We were down and he brought us all the way back. We had a chance,” said New England receiver Jabar Gaffney, who caught a touchdown pass and a 2-point conversion from Cassel as the Patriots rallied from a 24-6 deficit before losing 34-31. “It kind of looked like No. 12 was back there.”

After playing behind Heisman Trophy winners Matt Leinart and Carson Palmer at Southern Cal, Cassel seemed to be a stretch for the backup role when the Patriots picked him in the seventh round of the 2005 draft. But when the reigning NFL MVP was lost for the season in the opening week, Cassel stepped in and had the Patriots right where they were in all those years under Brady: first place in the AFC East.

Thursday night’s loss left the Jets atop the division, but at the same time it quieted talk that Cassel was just a glorified backup keeping Brady’s seat warm.

“Matt established his personality,” defensive lineman Richard Seymour said. “He’s confident in what he’s doing. He played great.”

Make no mistake: Brady will get his ob back as soon as he is healthy. But Cassel has probably made himself too valuable to return for another season holding clipboards. He is eligible to become a free agent after the season, and he may have already earned a chance to start elsewhere in a quarterback-driven league.Cassel completed 30 of 51 passes for 400 yards and three touchdowns and ran eight times for 62 yards — career highs across the board and more than that, too.

He was the first player in the league since the merger to have at least 400 yards passing and 60 yards rushing in a game; Steve Young threw for 449 and ran for 50 in 1992. He had the most yards rushing for a Patriots quarterback in 30 years and the most yards passing for New England since 2002.

Only one other time since coach Bill Belichick arrived in 2000 has a Patriots quarterback led the team to touchdowns in both two-minute drills. It wasn’t Brady, the two-time Super Bowl MVP; nor Drew Bledsoe; nor former backup Doug Flutie, who has a history of heroics himself, who managed it. It was Cassel, back in his second career game in 2005, when he filled in for Brady for a meaningless regular-season finale for his only extended playing time before this year.

“He made plays all night,” tight end David Thomas said Friday. “He put the team in position to win, and that’s all you can ask for.”

The Patriots trailed 24-6 with 1:44 left in the first half when Cassel led them 68 yards, helping himself out with a career-long 19-yard scramble before hitting Gaffney for a 19-yard touchdown with 15 seconds left in the half. In the fourth quarter, Cassel took over with 64 seconds left, 62 yards to go and no timeouts; he delivered with a perfectly thrown 16-yard pass to Randy Moss — who made an equally perfect catch — for the tying touchdown with 1 second left in regulation.

His only two incomplete passes of the final drive were spikes to stop the clock.

“Any time you can come back from a 24-6 deficit, it’s a building block and something every team should be proud of,” he said. “I hope I’ve earned the confidence of these guys on the team throughout the course of the year. That was a situation that we’ve practiced a lot, to go down and be able to execute and score that touchdown when we needed to. I think that is a confidence-builder for us offensively.”

At first it was kind of cute. When the Boston Red Sox [team stats] won the 2004 World Series at Busch Stadium, I was happy for their fans. Boston is a passionate and traditional baseball town, and Red Sox Nation endured considerable angst through the decades, ever since some apparently intoxicated fool concluded it would be a swell idea to trade Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.

So after the Red Sox and their fans cavorted on the field at Busch, I wrote a column of congratulations. Earlier I had been a good sport following Super Bowl XXXVI, after quarterback Tom Brady [stats] orchestrated the first of his many epic, fourth-quarter drives to lead the New England Patriots [team stats] to a shocking upset over the Rams.

Sure, the Rams should have won. But the underdog Patriots opted to be introduced as a team that day, compared to the individualistic, prancing, showboating Rams. That earned respect points. And the Super Bowl was played only a few months after the horrific national tragedy of Sept. 11. And the team had that name … PATRIOTS. And those colors, red white and blue. It was a neat story. Not quite Paul Revere’s ride, but it struck the right theme for that snapshot of American culture.

I’m over it now.

Enough already with Boston area teams winning championships.

Since 2001, the Patriots have won three Super Bowls, the Red Sox finally terminated the nonsense of that sorry, no-account built-in excuse (“Curse of the Bambino”) to win the World Series in 2004 and 2007. And now the Boston Celtics [team stats] are NBA champs after a long drought.

Which means we had to read 5,000 references about how ol’ Red Auerbach was smiling upstairs on that bench in the sky, lighting up a victory cigar. No, he wasn’t; actually Red was out there, somewhere, trying to swindle Ben Kerner again. (“Can you believe I got this moron, Kerner, to trade me Bill Russell?”)

Enough with the preening and gloating and this nonstop Boston “Me” Party.

I’m a big guy, so it pains me to say this, but I’m tired of seeing those chunky, pink-faced white guys wearing Celtics throwbacks, straight out of that stupid House of Pain video (“Jump Around”) shouting “We’re No. 1″ at TV cameras with distorted faces.

Hey, Sully – I didn’t see you kick the field goal. That was Vinatieri. So quit rolling around in the end zone. Yo, Murph yeah, you in the Bird jersey, bum-rushing the floor at the Garden on Tuesday night when the Celtics destroyed the Lakers to win the NBA championship. Yeah, you. That’s right. You aren’t even Eddie Bird (Larry’s brother), so get off the basketball court and let the Celtics players celebrate.

They should rename Boston’s “Big Dig” and call it “Dig Me.”

And I can’t take another column/blog by relentless Boston sports homer Bill Simmons on ESPN.com. Most guys in our business can get a column done in 800 words or so, but every time a Boston team wins a game, Simmons feels compelled to cluster bomb about 27,438 words on innocent sports fans. The dude takes himself more seriously than Thomas Paine did in writing “Common Sense” during Revolutionary War times.

Hell, I can’t even watch “The Departed” anymore. It’s one of my favorite films.

But it’s set in Boston.

And of course, it won the Oscar for best picture in 2006.

Why am I so bitter?

For starters, because St. Louis has been way too generous to Boston during the years. That’s one reason. Bobby Orr scored the famous Stanley-Cup clinching goal for the Boston Bruins [team stats] against the Blues in 1970 while (seemingly) flying through air.

The NBA St. Louis Hawks had the No. 2 pick in the 1956 draft and took Russell. Then Kerner got suckered by Auerbach and traded Russell to the Celtics [team stats]. Russell, of course, centered a dynasty that won 11 NBA championships in his 13 seasons. It was one of the all-time dunderhead transactions in the history of sport.

St. Louisan James Busch Orthwein played a key role in the Patriots [team stats]’ resurgence; he bought the team when no one wanted it, hired Bill Parcells as coach, got the Pats into a Super Bowl, then sold the franchise to Robert Kraft. If Orthwein doesn’t hire Parcells, then Kraft never buddies up with a Parcells assistant, Bill Belichick. Together, Kraft and Belichick teamed for those three Super Bowl champions.

St. Louis born-and-trained soccer stars Taylor Twellman, Steve Ralston and Pat Noonan made the New England Revolution an MLS regular-season power.

I’m jaded because we’ve learned a few things during the years. I didn’t know about Spygate when I wrote those gracious words about the Patriots taking down the Rams for their first Super Bowl championship. I didn’t know that the Patriots were devious cheaters – more like Cold War Soviet spies conducting espionage than true American patriots. I thought I was watching a feel-good story in Super Bowl XXXVI; it didn’t occur to me that I was witnessing a crime being committed.

It also bugged me to discover that Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore were running around the field at Busch Stadium when the Red Sox [team stats] won in 2004, filming the final scene for the sappy, vapid, typically self-absorbed Boston-experience film, “Fever Pitch.”

Do I like anything about Boston?

Sure.

Bob Ryan, the sportswriter.

Sam Adams, the beer.

The Dropkick Murphys, the band.

The song “Roadrunner,” by the Modern Lovers.

JFK, the first U.S. president elected in my lifetime.

Dunkin Donuts, obviously.

That’s about it. Just some minor relief from this “Hub of the Universe” domination.

You can have Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, too. And Keith Tkachuk, for that matter.

Allegedly, Tom Brady is in discussions with Calvin Klein to follow David Beckham, and pose as an underwear model. The Private eye for the company, Paul Barresi claims ” I am confident that Brady will blow the competition out of the water.”

This ought to be interesting. Think he will do it? Will this help/harm him?