Passions running high -- very understandable.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with a couple things, though...
Arrogant Pats? That shows a clear lack of knowledge about the Pats, who have been anything but arrogant this entire season. Aside from the last two minutes of the super bowl, when they were indeed acting arrogant, they have been quite humble all season, considering.
They provided virtually NO bulletin material all season, while plenty of other teams spewed ******** all over the place.
I mean, if you have lot's of printed or video evidence of all this arrogance, let's see it.
You're right about "bulletin material." They didn't do too much trash-talking...at least, not directly. But like any team, they had a few lapses. Bruschi calling the win over San Diego the "most satisfying win of [his] career" was pretty clearly a swipe at anyone who doubted their past success in the wake of Spygate. I'd say that qualifies as (some) arrogance.
It's a fine line, though. Is Belicheck's constant stonewalling and icy demeanor arrogant, for example? Seems somewhat smug, at the very least. Was Brady arrogant for his response to Burress' own arrogance when he said he expected to score more than 17 points?
Hard to say. When a team is as good as New England was, a lot of swagger is justified. How and when that crosses over arrogance is hard to say.
If this is about the alleged "running up the score", which plenty of NFL teams who have lost to the Pats have called nonsense, you are dead wrong, period.
Well, plenty of losing teams said they didn't mind. They refused to make excuses and put the responsibility on themselves to stop them, but that's not quite the same thing.
There's really two issues here: 1) did they run up the score, and 2) if so, is that a problem? I'm not sure about #2, but I think #1 is pretty clear-cut. If I'm not mistaken (I might be), at one point they ran a score in with 17 seconds left. If they take a knee, the game's over, so I'd say that qualifies as running up the score.
Ditto for the many instances in which they kept airing it out with big leads in the 4th quarter. I'm not suggesting they should really let up, but this wasn't a guard against comebacks. Just the opposite; common sense dictates that those comebacks are far less likely if you run the ball and burn as much clock as possible.
So, I dunno if it's a problem when a team runs up the score, but I do think that's what they were doing. And it's understandable why other fans could find it "arrogant" to keep scoring when a knee ends the game.
And, of course, it could be perceived as somewhat arrogant to keep playing your starters in several meaningless games with the only conceivable benefit being a) breaking records and b) going undefeated. They had home field advantage locked up, and they had numerous games locked up, but they kept trotting guys out there
I won't even get into the Stetson ads.