Every Sunday this year, regular as clockwork, the Patriots have demolished another opponent, leaving fans of their hapless victims seized by a vague, nameless horror so mystical and well-nigh ineffable that they almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. One ESPN columnist has opined that in response to the trumped up "sign-stealing" scandal from earlier this year, head coach Bill Belichick is attempting to "lay waste to the NFL" (while another posits next weekend's tilt against the Colts, the other undefeated team in the league, as a battle of good vs. evil).

Well, if the idea is to show that Belichick doesn't need film from the other team's sidelines to win a game, just running up the score won't help. Perhaps, if they get past the Colts, he could just let the players on the field against some second-rate opponent play the game as they saw fit, while he himself was on the sidelines, visibly engaged in a seven-game simultaneous chess match with the rest of his coaching staff. If they won without any assistance from the coaches, electronic or otherwise, it probably still wouldn't silence the critics, but it would be interesting to watch. The chess, I mean... because the second halves of these football games have just been impossibly dull.