Belichick: The NFL's hooded villain

A YEAR AGO at this time, Richard Sherman was the most recognized evil villain in all of football, his wild-eyed postgame rant scaring men, women and children alike and identifying for them at least the Evil and the Good in the upcoming Super Bowl.

But as any good comic fan can tell you, evil and good are fleeting designations when it comes to morality plays. When Batman's Robin was killed, he came back as a vengeful hooded character named Red Hood. When a hero-worshiping acquaintance of Spider-Man had a little mishap with electric eels, the switch flipped on him, too, and he turned into a living electric generator named Electro.

He, too, wore a hood.

Then there was Hood, or The Hood, a small-time crook until he started wearing his hoodie, which enabled him to run on air and, um, spy on people.

You get where this is headed, right?

Bill Belichick wears a hood.

At least on Sundays.

And he likes to spy on people. Until he got caught, that is.

And he's kind of a living electric generator, a lightning rod of controversy whether he is videotaping opponents' sidelines to steal signals (from 2000 until he was caught in '07 in what became known as Spygate), bending the substitution rules to the breaking point as he did against the Ravens 2 weeks ago, or claiming he was oblivious to 11 of the 12 balls used by his team Sunday missing a couple of pounds of air pressure.

He also has coached the New England Patriots into six Super Bowls over the last 12 seasons, including the one two Sundays from now. Partly because of his methods in obtaining this success, but mostly because of a surly and dismissive demeanor, he has reached and become and maintained his status as the NFL's No. 1 villain. In doing so, he has poisoned the perception of his all-American-looking quarterback so that he, too, is now viewed as evil by many.

Including - hee, hee, hee - Sherman.

"I think people somehow get a skewed view of Tom Brady," Sherman said yesterday. "That he's just a clean-cut guy that does everything right and never says a bad word to anyone. We know him to be otherwise."

Like the hooded Volturi Coven of the "Twilight" series, Belichick, Brady and their New England teammates have their six-state domain operating as a human shield. We know this because while the rest of the country is discussing whether Belichick should be suspended or even fired after his team apparently was caught illegally and intentionally deflating the balls used by Brady in his 45-7 decimation of the Indianapolis Colts last Sunday, many of their subjects have countered with a heightened sense of victimization not seen since they were convinced a ghost was haunting their baseball team over a decade ago.

A physicist from the local college even endangered his reputation by arguing in a local newspaper that the wet weather sucked the air from the ball, not a coven operative. People are jealous, wish they lived here, say followers, an argument that dates back to the Celtics dynasties and is made only a little less ridiculous now because of an unusually mild winter up there.

No, people don't want to live in snow and slush and they don't like the Patriots mostly because of the guy wearing the hood. It's as if he jumped from the comic-book pages - mean-looking, meticulous, Machiavellian, and utterly unconcerned about his unpopularity.

As Spygate suggested, he will do anything to gain an edge, to win. Even his blindest followers would not dispute that. The Patriots' pick plays, disguised as crossing routes, have forced a more stringent enforcement of the rules. Opposing coaches have complained in the past about their communication signals being jammed, and of even their practices being filmed. In the game preceding this one, the Patriots exploited a loophole in the rules to line up a fifth offensive lineman in the slot - a trick no doubt that Chip Kelly took note of.

They are, in some ways, like Fred Shero's Flyers - unpopular everywhere else, a constant embarrassment to those who run the league they dominated. Headed up by a Machiavellian mastermind whose results are far more important to his coven than are his methods of achieving them.

Those Flyers broke some rules, bent a whole bunch of them, and went to the Stanley Cup finals 3 straight years, winning the first two. Everyone hated them but us - at least until they beat those evil, red-helmeted Soviets.

A year ago, Richard Sherman and his chip-on-their-shoulders Seahawks were that Red Army team. And they might very well have been again - if The Hood and his coven hadn't reappeared.

Now we see Sherman as the good guy. And, with Belichick at the controls, we at least suspect Brady to be otherwise.