America at Large:The temptation is to view the events of last weekend's NFL draft as some sort of Faustian bargain on the part of Robert Kraft. It might also be noted if it seems that the New England Patriots are being held to a different standard than other teams it is only because they set the bar themselves. In the 13 years that have elapsed since he purchased what would become the NFL's most dominant franchise, Kraft repeatedly took the moral high ground in deciding who would and who would not play for his team.

"We're not going to have thugs and troublemakers on our football team," Kraft reminded me on numerous occasions. "If I were convinced that was the only way to win in this league, I'd get out of the business."

A case in point: two years into Kraft's stewardship, the Patriots selected a defensive tackle from Nebraska in the fifth round of the 1996 draft. This move raised some eyebrows, since Christian Peter had a history of alcohol-fuelled violence to women, including a pending attempted rape charge that had yet to be adjudicated.

After I reflected my surprise that day in a conversation with Myra Kraft, the owner's wife, she quickly scurried off to confer with her husband. The following morning the Patriots announced that they had rescinded their draft rights to Christian Peter, who eventually signed with another team.

During the 1998 draft, the Patriots, in keeping with their by-now well-defined moral stance, took Randy Moss's name off the board altogether. Although he was widely regarded the most talented receiver available from that year's collegiate crop, he had already demonstrated a propensity for finding trouble.

Moss was still in high school when he was jailed for 30 days on an assault charge, a sentence which wound up being tripled when he tested positive for marijuana while he was still in the sneezer. As a collegian at Marshall he had been charged with domestic battery in a beef with the mother of his two children.

A few years later the Patriots, with no help from Christian Peter or Randy Moss, went on to win three Super Bowls in four years.

Moss somewhat predictably turned out to be a malingerer, a petulant and selfish player who didn't care much for blocking or running all-out on pass routes on occasions when he hadn't been designated the primary receiver.

All of which seemed to uphold the Patriots' self-imposed credo of integrity. "I think the American people are fed up with overindulged athletes who are making very high incomes, and can lead a certain style of life, and don't respect the responsibilities they have to conduct themselves in a certain manner," Kraft explained with just a touch of self-congratulation.

As in many sports, the "gangsta" culture has become increasingly pervasive among NFL players, and with off-field thuggery reaching epidemic proportions over the 2006 season, commissioner Roger Goodell decided to crack down, suspending Tennessee defensive back Adam (Pac- Man) Jones for the season and Cincinnati wide receiver Chris Henry for the first eight games of 2007.

Pac-Man had had at least 10 run-ins with the law since joining the NFL. Henry had been arrested five times, including a felony gun rap, in a year, making him the poster boy for a Cincinnati franchise which has seen 10 different active players arrested over the past two years.

The Patriots might have been expected to view these proceedings with a certain lofty Schadenfreude, and probably would have were it not for the fact that the team has experienced something of a fall from grace, having been eliminated in the play-offs in each of the last two seasons. Which may or may not explain the events of last weekend. When it came time for New England to make its selection in the first round of the 2007 NFL draft, the Patriots selected Brandon Meriweather, an undeniably talented safety from the University of Miami who had already been bypassed by other teams because of perceived "character issues."

During a well-documented brawl in a game against Florida International, Meriweather was caught on videotape repeatedly stomping on the head of a defenceless opponent who was already on the ground. (Should anyone care to check this out, the unseemly episode has been preserved for posterity, courtesy YouTube.) Somewhat more alarmingly, he had been involved last summer in a shooting near his Miami dorm, when he fired three shots at the assailant in a drive-by shooting. Although the incident was deemed justifiable (Meriweather had a permit to carry a weapon, but, of course, so did Seung Hui-Cho) since the drive-by shooter had already wounded team-mate Kyle Cooper (with a bullet in the posterior), but you still have to wonder about a college student who walks around campus at 6:30 in the morning with a pistol tucked in his pants.

Then on Sunday, Day Two of the draft, the Patriots dropped the other shoe when they traded their fourth-round draft to the Oakland Raiders. For Randy Moss. "We're comfortable with the player we drafted," said head coach Bill Belichick, who also made some noise by trading away his other first-round pick. "All of us have made mistakes. What's more important is not an incident a person has, but who they are."

And Randy Moss could become the latest of Belichick's reclamation projects to revive his career in Foxboro as a born-again model citizen.

But this much is certain. The Patriots can no longer hold themselves up as a bastion of moral superiority in a league run amok. If they win next year, they will have done so because they became just like the rest of them.

And if they don't, some are sure to maintain, it will be because the team has sacrificed its soul.