Jenice Armstrong: When it comes to hubby support, Gisele's a model wife

UNLESS you're a co-star on VH1's "Basketball Wives," a professional athlete's wife doesn't publicly diss her husband's teammates.

No matter how badly she feels about how things went, she doesn't trash-talk other players, especially if the team is still smarting from a disappointing Super Bowl loss the way the Patriots were on Sunday night.

But c'mon.

Gisele Bundchen's a supermodel - not superhuman. New England's 21-to-17 loss to the N.Y. Giants was devastating, and Mrs. Tom Brady was still reeling when a pack of bullies confronted her outside a VIP elevator at Lucas Oil Stadium, in Indianapolis, and hassled her about her husband's performance. It was a huge loss for her husband, so you can imagine how she felt as she listened to Giants fans hurling insults such as, "Eli Manning owns your husband."

That's her guy they were trash-talking, the father of her child.

Could you just stand by and let people get away with it? I'm not sure I could have.

And neither could Bundchen. According to Insider.com's video, she snapped, dropping an f-bomb and saying, "You have to catch the ball when you're supposed to catch the ball. My husband cannot f------ throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can't believe they dropped the ball so many times."

Girlfriend may have spoken out of turn, but she was right. Even Brady's teammate Wes Welker, who dropped a pass on New York's 20 that could have helped the Pats hold onto their 17-15 lead with about four minutes remaining, agreed that he'd screwed up. "I've made that play 1,000 times in practice," he said. "Then the one time I don't come up with it is here?"

Brenda Thomas, a one-time personal assistant to pro basketballer Stephon Marbury who chronicled what she learned about the NBA into a juicy piece of fiction, said that Bundchen broke ranks when she rushed to her husband's defense.

"I think they [players' wives] all have their roles, and that's the unwritten rule. You sit here quietly in a box and that's where you sit," added Thomas, president of BLT Personal Services. "Women who are outspoken, have their own lives, and they don't make good players wives. It's OK to own a boutique. It's OK to say you're a model . . . it's kind of old school, when you look at it."

In this case, "old school" is code for sexist. Think about it: Had the Patriots been a female team and had a husband spoken out, he wouldn't have gotten the same level of pushback.

But with Bundchen, who once had a $25 million contract to parade around in Victoria's Secret underwear, there's a sense of "how dare she try to interject her girlie opinion into the manly sport of football?"

"She is Gisele, and she's also not the typical wife," pointed out Crystal McCrary Anthony, former wife of Seattle Supersonic Greg Anthony and author of the novel Homecourt Advantage. "She's someone who has trailblazed her own path. She's not financially dependent on her husband.

"I think there's a certain power that a woman feels when she's not financially dependent on her man. Subconsciously, she's probably like, 'Screw you guys. I'm going to say what's on my mind.' "

And that, of course, is when the trouble started.