The Patriot are in everyone's head.
And not this is not a statement from a Pats-fan wearing blinders and only thinking of New England. There is a lot of validity to it. When teams enter through the opposition doors of Gillette Stadium, they are paranoid. Thinking Patriots personnel bug the opposing locker room or mess around with the water coolers. Some teams even go as far as searching trash cans for listening devices to disposing of their own trash from the team hotel.
If this what teams are really worried about before the game begins, they are paranoid and by doing so they are only doing their team a disservice and the Patriots. Even if it only takes five minutes to search all the trash cans in the locker room or take their old newspapers out of their hotel room, it is five minutes they can never get back.
Five minutes wasted preparing their own team. Five minutes gone as your team is 24 hours away from playing the defending NFL champion. Wouldn't you want all the time you can get to prepare if your playing a team that just won the championship? I would.
Pre-game tampering is just one thing opposition coaches are paranoid about when they enter One Patriot Place. The other thing is when something minuscule really does go wrong like the headsets along the sideline go out the opposition things the Patriots had something to do with it when in fact those little technological mishap happen each week at different stadiums around the league. Nothing's perfect and nobody's perfect. Things will go wrong. Things will fail from time to time.
So a note to opposing teams coming into Gillette: don't be paranoid. You're not helping yourself. If you really want to beat the defending champion your full attention needs to be directed at your team.
In the words of Bill Belichick "Ignore the Noise." Ignore the noise and all the outside influences.
On a side note, when Gillette Stadium fans broke into the "Where is Roger?" chant in the fourth quarter, that was not the first "Where is Roger?" chant every chanted in New England. Red Sox fans will remember Game Three of the 1999 ALCS against the New York Yankees, Sox fans broke into into a "Where is Roger?" directed at Roger Clemens four failing to make it out of the fourth inning against Pedro Martinez.
