America at Large: If you listened to the New England Patriots you'd think they were going off to Houston the biggest underdogs since George Bush invaded Iraq.
Twenty-four months ago the Patriots might actually have been rank outsiders, but they managed to convert that status to their advantage. The high-flying St Louis Rams were a 14-point betting favourite in the Super Bowl two years ago, and after an improbable, last-second 20-17 victory in the Louisiana Superdome, the New England players, almost to a man, retrospectively acknowledged having been inspired by the low regard in which they had been held in the build-up to the game.
"No one believed in us but ourselves," became the locker-room mantra.
Two years later the Patriots find themselves marching off to Super Bowl XXXVIII under the same tune, which has by now become a bit frayed. Last Sunday's 24-14 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game was the team's 14th in a row, and 16th of the season, but to hear the Patriots tell it they've been fighting an uphill battle all the way.
Moments after the game, New England safety Rodney Harrison, who had been responsible for picking off the first of four interceptions Colts quarterback Peyton Manning would throw that day, stood before a battery of microphones in the bowels of Gillette Stadium and proclaimed, "No one gave us a chance." The media types in the room simultaneously scratched their heads.
"Uh, Rodney," two dozen scribes wanted to ask (though none did), "weren't you guys three-point favourites against the Colts?"
"It really fuelled a fire and it gave us a lot of energy because we got tired of hearing it," Harrison said of the alleged bias against his team.
"The way you earn respect, you have to go out there and win ball games, so it really created a great opportunity for us to overcome some adversity."
Manning had, to be sure, been under the spotlight coming into the championship game. He had been voted the NFL's regular-season Most Valuable Player (an honour he shared with Tennessee's Steve McNair), and in two play-off games had been virtually unstoppable, completing 44 of 56 passes for 681 yards, eight touchdowns, and no interceptions.
So after shutting down Manning last Sunday, New England cornerback Ty Law, who accounted for the other three interceptions, followed Harrison to the microphone and claimed, "nobody believes in us."
"We like being the underdog in everyone's mind," chimed in quarterback Tom Brady after outplaying Manning in their mano-a-mano duel at Foxboro.
"All I heard anyone say this week was how Indianapolis was on such a roll," owner Robert Kraft trumpeted to the crowd as he hoisted the championship trophy at midfield.
What nobody seems to have pointed out to the Patriots is that less than an hour after the conclusion of football that night the Las Vegas oddmakers installed them as seven-point favourites to win the Super Bowl. This "us against the world" stuff is wearing thin.
Way back in September, after the Patriots released defensive leader Lawyer Milloy in a salary-cap-inspired economic move and then got themselves blasted out, 31-0, by the Buffalo Bills in their season opener, all this "disrespect" stuff might have had some justification. Three weeks after the Buffalo debacle, New England were beaten once again, this time in Washington. That was in September. They haven't lost since.
This is not to say that one football team playing in Houston a week from Sunday won't be accorded a ghost of a chance, but it's the Carolina Panthers who have usurped the Patriots' role as America's Underdogs.
The teams didn't play in the regular season, but met in the finale two years ago in a game rescheduled in the wake of the September 11th attacks. When the Patriots won 38-6 it was the 15th straight loss for Carolina, who fired coach George Seifert a few days later, replacing him with John Fox.
Until recent weeks the Panthers' remarkable turnaround had gone all but unnoticed on the national stage, but after winning the NFC South (the so-called NASCAR Division), Carolina beat Dallas in Charlotte and then went on the road to oust two of the NFC powerhouses, the Rams and, last week, the Philadelphia Eagles.
To describe them as a largely anonymous collection understates the case. Quarterback Jake Delhomme wasn't drafted by a single NFL team and cut his professional teeth serving as Kurt Warner's back-up with the Amsterdam Admirals several years ago. Delhomme's principal claim to fame before reaching the Super Bowl was that he grew up in Beaux Bridge, Louisiana, a sleepy bayou town which gets no argument in its claim to being "The Crawfish Capital of the World". Running back Stephen Davis's most memorable NFL moment probably remains the day he got beaten silly (with the television cameras running) by a wide receiver in a training-camp fist fight when he was with the Washington Redskins several years back.
The best-known Panther of all time is probably wide receiver Rae Carruth, who is serving a life sentence for having his pregnant girlfriend murdered in an effort to avoid child-support payments.
The best-known current Panther could be running back/kick returner Rod Smart, but not for anything he did on the football field this year. When he played for the Las Vegas Outlaws of the late, unlamented XFL, Smart wore, in lieu of his name and for reasons which remain murky, the slogan "He Hate Me" on the back of his jersey.
"How," wondered the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy a few days ago, "are you supposed to hate 'He Hate Me'?"
