New England Patriots did everything they could with what they had, but in the end they just didn’t have enough. Their hard work and Bill Belichick’s coaching simply couldn’t make up for years of too many failed personnel decisions. The fact that they came one play – any one play out of maybe a dozen – from winning the Lombardi Trophy is a remarkable accomplishment.

Some argue that Patriots’ QB Tom Brady lost the game or had a bad game. Neither is true. Brady played a really good defense, possibly the best in the league and certaunly the defense in the best position to stop New England’s passing attack. Eli Manning, on the other hand, played New England’s pedestrian, though hard playing, defense and even then he needed a wide receiver of his to come up with a catch that will be on the short list of Super Bowl highlights for years to come.

Yes, Brady made mistakes and his throws weren’t all on target, but that’s what happens when you play against a fast and hard-hitting defense that can also cover. The quarterback doesn’t get the same kind of comfort level that he’ll enjoy against teams like Buffalo Bills or Denver Broncos.

The lack of depth on New England’s offense finally caught up with the team. With Rob Gronkowski rendered ineffective by injuries Brady was left with really only two weapons: Wes Welker and Aaron Hernandez. That would have been good enough in most regular season games but it creates a dangerously small margin of error in the play offs.

1-3.

That’s New England Patriots’ combined 2011 regular and post-season record against teams with winning records in the regular season. New England’s loss was to the Giants was as narrow as their victory over the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship game.

Enjoy a few photos from Boston University’s aggravating 3-1 loss to Maine Black Bears on Saturday, January 28, at Agganis Arena.

The most memorable sequence of the game occurred in the second period with BU trailing 1-0. A frantic attempt to score resulted in practically every player on ice ending up in Maine’s goal crease. The situation resulted in a power play opportunity for BU that converted into a game-tying score by Garrett Noonan. Shortly thereafter, six minutes into the second period, Maine re-took the lead and didn’t let go of it. Maine scored its final goal in an empty net.

I heard Gleen Ordway on WEEI literally sputter with anger over Jason Whitlock’s January 19 column at FoxSports.com on Sunday’s AFC Championship game between New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens. Ordway so badly wanted his listeners to understand that he just couldn’t understand what Whitlock’s talking about. The best part of the few minutes I listened to was when Ordway tried to argue that Whitlock was contradicting himself, only to suddenly realize he wasn’t. Then he had to dial up the anger a bit more.

What made Ordway so mad? Whitlock’s noticed that Patriots offense is mostly white, while Ravens defense is mostly black. Not only that, but Patriots are a bunch of dapper pretty boys compared to Baltimore’s thugs.

Race! Culture! Too much for Ordway to handle.

Yet, a somewhat interesting aspect of the Patriots during Bill Belichick’s extremely successful – although not flawless – leadership is that they have been markedly more white than NFL in general. It’s not likely that the Patriots racial composition is entirely coincidental. Given NFL’s position as the by far most popular sport in the country and New England’s place as the most successful franchise over the past decade it doesn’t seem outrageous to bring up the topic.

However, this matchup doesn’t excite me all that much as a clash of races or styles. Instead, it’s a great match up between two wildly different football philosophies: the new-age aerial attack* of the Patriots against the old school headbashing of the Ravens. The fact that the Patriots and Ravens seem to genuinely dislike each other only makes it better (Patriots defense and Ravens offense are both garbage by comparison, but Patriots defensive line and Ravens offensive line are both quality units with big bodied hard hitting men – no clash of styles there).

Should be a heck of a game.

*Granted, new-age aerial attacks have been around at least since Don Coryell, but this time it’s different.

On Sunday, January 22, the New England Patriots face the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship Game.

Patriots are favored to win the game and if they do they could end up playing the New York Giants in Super Bowl.

Here’s an interesting nugget about that possibility:

Patriots have lost playoff games to five different teams during the Bill Belichick and Tom Brady era: Denver Broncos, Indianapolis Colts, Giants, Ravens and New York Jets.

This season, Patriots have beaten the Jets (twice), the Colts and the Broncos in the regular season, and then the Broncos again in the divisional playoff round. In other words, Patriots have a shot this season at beating all the teams that have derailed them over the past six seasons. The losses to New England cost the Jets a spot in the post season and sent the club into a tailspin. The Colts have been completely devastated and the team’s owner has stampeded the General Manager out of town. Patriots’ 45-10 drubbing of the Broncos put an end to Tim Tebow’s improbable 2011 run.

I hope Belichick and Brady get to complete their tour of retribution.

New England Patriots closed out its 2011 regular season by beating visiting Buffalo Bills 49-21 at Gillette Stadium on January 1, 2012. With the win the Patriots secured the AFC number 1 seed, meaning the Patriots will play a divisional playoff game, and, should they win it, the AFC Championship Game, at home.

Patriots got off to a rough start, falling behind 21-0 in the first quarter. At that point boos rained down at the home team, but the fans turned quickly as soon as the home team showed some sign of life and by the time New England cut Buffalo’s lead to 21-14 the crowd seemed about as joyous and confident as one could have expected if the team had a 14-point lead.

It took until the fourth quarter for the Patriots to get there but once they did the Bills caved completely and New England added another 14 points.

For a couple of weeks in a row Patriots defense have started out breaking, thenm bending, then dominating. Against the Bills, Sterling Moore made two excellent interceptions. The first one set up Patriots go ahead touchdown in the third quarter, the second one was returned by Moore for a touchdown.

Below are a few photos from the “Disney On Ice – Treasure Trove” show that’s playing at TD Garden in Boston this week.

The Treasure Trove show is an on-ice highlight reel of sorts from some Disney’s most famous movies (eg Snow White, Lion King, and Peter Pan) as well as some more recent movies (Aladdin, The Incredibles, Rapunzel(?) and some movie I didn’t recognize). The children around me enjoyed the spectacle – which included fireworks, a magic carpet ride, fairly elaborate sets and cannon fire – so the show seems to do the trick.

Remaining performances are on Tuesday, December 27, at Noon, 3 pm and 7 pm; Wednesday, December 28, at 11 am, 3 pm and 7; and Thursday, December 29, at 1 pm and 5 pm (the Boston Celtics return to the Garden on December 30).

It’s been a little over a year since this and things haven’t gotten better, have they? Even if former Kent State Golden Flashes quarterback Julian Edelman – who somehow makes a living as a marginal player among other marginal players on the New England Patriots barren roster – didn’t molest a woman at a nightclub at 1:30 in the morning two nights after his team got stomped by the Steelers, he was, indisputably, partying at 1:30 in the morning two nights after his team got stomped by Steelers. The Edelman incident came just days after doofus tight-end Rob Gronkowski spent his bye weekend cavorting with some pornstar out in the Arizona desert.

New England Patriots have the worst defense in the league and the offense remains as one-dimensional as it has since 2007.

The current crop of Patriots aren’t just young, they are immature. It is hard to believe that football is as important to them as is enjoying the fruits of being important in football. They are mentally soft. They are sloppy. They aren’t remarkably physical. Without Tom Brady at quarterback they might well be winless.

Belichick improbably earned a coach of the year award last year thanks to his team winning the possibly most fraudulent 14-2 record in the history of the NFL. They did absolutely nothing in the playoffs besides bumbling their way to a loss against the also overrated New York Jets.

These Patriots are Belichick’s creation. This is the team he drafted, traded for, bought. It has almost no talent at all on defense and it is to a large degree smoke and mirrors on offense. For the fourth season in a row it has a negligible pass rush and it can’t get off the field on third downs, if opponents were somehow unlucky enough to encounter that situation.

Sure, the Patriots remain a top 12 team in the league – Brady-to-Welker is that good of a combination – and will likely make the playoffs again, where they will again collapse, exposed by hungrier and better opponents.

Patriots’ drafts have been so bad for several years in a row it is almost comical. There is only so much that genius head coach Bill Belichick can do to make up for the mediocre general manager Bill Belichick. He’s coming up short. He no longer has control of his team. The players pay lip service to his greatness but their weak efforts and lack of discipline betray them. Maybe they feel betrayed, too. If the Patriots are so great, and their coach is so great, why are they so bad?

The Patriots Dynasty died many years ago. It’s time to end the era in which it existed.

[Update 12/26: The charges against Edelman have been dropped.]

At this time 43 deaths have been attributed to Irene. Almost 3 million people are still without power. Whole villages have reportedly been submerged, roads and bridges swept away by floods caused by pounding rain.

Yet, some insist that Irene was over hyped.

They’re wrong.

I visited the San Diego Convention Center a couple of weeks ago and was quite impressed by it. It’s located just a frew minutes’ cab ride from the San Diego International Airport, bookended by two hotels – Hilton to the south and Marriott to the north – and it runs parallell to the San Diego Bay to the west and Harbor Drive and the transit train to the east. The visitor-friendly Gaslamp Quarter with its myriad of bars, cafes and restaurants is literally across the street and Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, is just a few walkable blocks away, as is aircraft carrier museum USS Midway.

It is, quite simply, a great place to hold a convention or conference. Below are a dozen pictures from the convention center and its immediate surroundings.

Jeremy Schoemaker – perhaps better know as ShoeMoney, his online moniker – wrote in a blog post July 13 that “Twitter will suffer a similar fate as MySpace.”

It’s somewhat hard to tell from Schoemaker’s post what exactly MySpace’s fate is in his eyes, but in his own words:

MySpace’s financial situation is much worse. A couple years ago the company was valued at over 20 billion dollars. Now its valuation is around 30 million dollars [it sold for $35 million plus a small minority stake].

While the traffic as a whole has declined on MySpace dramatically the valuation has dropped at more then 20x the rate.
I believe MySpaces biggest reason for such a huge drop in revenue is because of the demographic switch of their users. As people who can afford to purchase items that companies are advertising are leaving, the people coming in are giving advertisers next to zero return on their investments.

I can’t recall any time when MySpace was perceived as a magnet for people “who can afford to purchase items.” It was always an ugly juvenile cesspool that clearly blinded media executives with a dramatic user growth story. Squeezing money out of the site’s low-end users is the kind of job that sleazy affiliate marketers excel at when they can operate in virtually unregulated territory. It certainly didn’t hurt their chances that Google signed a 3.5-year, $900 million ad-and-search deal with News Corp., a deal that gave Google a powerful incentive to let marketers run wild on the site.

The specific similarity between Twitter and MySpace that Schoemaker sees is that quality users are jumping ship.

The real value of Twitter always came from people with great opinions instantly chiming in. The quality of “Real Users” is nil compared to what it was a year ago.

I’ve been on Twitter since the end of 2008 and I can’t say I’ve seen much of a change in the quality of “real users,*” but then again I follow a massive 324 people while the more discriminating Schoemaker has found only 52 people worth following. Granted, he has 108,000 followers (I have 350 – holla bots!), who, according to his web site make up almost half of his “daily active readers.” His Twitter audience enables him to bring in $400 a week in advertising on that site, compared to the “over a hundred thousand dollars from advertisers paying [Schoemaker] to do tweets in the last couple years.” 7 months ago it was apparently $600 a week.

The “last couple of years” is an interesting period. In the summer of 2009 Schoemaker was promoting not only advertising on Twitter, but also advertising on the “worthless” MySpace. Heck, he promoted advertising on MySpace less than a year ago but he doesn’t appear to promote it presently. Which makes me wonder when MySpace became worthless to him?

What Twitter is worth to its investors and users is a fairly open question. It strikes me as a pretty poor medium for direct response, in part because messaging is so brief, visually indistinguishable and embedded in an endless stream of other messages. It’s probably a good deal better for customer relationship management (including customer service), public relations and deals or deal hunting. What the value of all that nets out to for Twitter’s owners and for people like Schoemaker is something I neither know nor particularly care about. I think Twitter is a quite useful service that is vulnerable to the short attention span of web users. Twitter could well end up dying on its boots without doing really anything wrong.

By the way, the $20 billion valuation is a BS number based on analysis of the most speculative kind.

*A good many users can probably be labeled as opportunistic users – including many politicians and celebrities – who will move on to the next hot thing at the drop of a hat.

A couple of disclosures:

I’ve met Schoemaker – briefly – a couple of times through a previous job. His personal story is a Horatio Alger-esque rags-to-riches one that I certainly do amdire. He is also a very skilled marketer and monetizer and you should always keep that in mind when you take in his words. If you don’t know much about Schoemaker I suggest you read Aaron Wall’s interview with him.

I used one of the MySpace advertising coupons that Schoemaker promoted in 2009. It worked as advertised.

I occasionally, maybe once or twice a year, run a miniscule ad campaign on MySpace/MyAds, mostly just to see what gives. I have not done it on Twitter and I am not planning on doing it either.