Know Thy Family

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

In some twisted modern NFL appellation, Bill Belichick is the Godfather.

Or, at least, the trade that sent Matt Cassel and Mike Vrabel to Kansas City, Scott Pioli’s new project, for a mere second round draft pick highlights that Belichick ascribes to a similar honor code as the Don Corleone.

I mistakenly clicked on Jay Mariotti’s column where in tones venomous and paranoid he accused the New England-Kansas City trade of amounting to collusion. (I refuse to link the column here and don't recommend seeking it out.)

Perhaps, though it seems a stretch. Pro football is a world of honor codes and backroom deals. That fact may anger the more nebbish among the press corps, but it is a reality nonetheless… certain teams simply won’t work with one another – can you imagine a trade between the Raiders and Broncos? – and the moves transacted away from the football field play into the larger game among and between the league’s 32 teams.

I guess the question is really what game is Belichick playing?

I hesitate to call Belichick’s regime at the Patriots “ethical” for obvious reasons. Spygate dismisses that term out of hand.

But Belichick’s tour around the league from the Giants to the Browns to the Patriots displays a distinct and consistent character. My man Zac at Throwing Into Traffic hit the nail on the head when he referred to the Belichick Mafia. Belichick adheres to an almost tribal sense of what’s right, loyalty foremost, whether or not the substance of those actions fall within the pale of rightness.

David Halberstam’s Education Of a Coach goes to great lengths to portray Belichick as a man of principle and the Patriots success as a reflection of those commitments. It’s an old school repose netting a new school boon.

Halberstram’s book was published a full two years before Spygate broke to the general public, the repeated references to the mountains of tape Belichick and cohort Ernie Adams wade through taking on a sinister meaning in retrospect.

Where Halberstam tried to sell Belichick as a principled free thinker, drawing on the lessons of the past to avoid the mistakes of the present, through a glass darkly we now see Belichick as possessing a complex relationship with morality but still a strict code with responsibilities and rewards.

Eric Mangini’s departure to the AFC East rival Jets is painted as defection. Perhaps Josh Daniels’s move to the Broncos is desertion as well. Not so with Pioli and Romeo Crennel who moved on with Belichick’s blessing.

Of course, the real problem is assigning higher morality to professional sports. Outside of sportsmanship, morality becomes murky when coaches and players are saddled with the singular commandment to win and win often. No doubt, we do invest professional sports with our ideals as we look to athletic grace and strict rules to reinforce some notion of how the world ought to be. But then of course is the matter of men as they are versus how they ought to be.

It should be noted in this mini drama played out that Belichick is not only doing right by Pioli, his long time second-in-command, but also his young now former quarterback.

Instead of following Cassel's coming out season with more toil behind the Golden Boy Tom Brady or exile to some backwater like Detroit, Belichick sends Cassel to a familiar newness, surrounded by Belichick people. That truth is lost in a bit of this back-and-forth bluster.

What does the move mean in football terms? The skinny on Cassel and his skills translating to other non-Patriots teams involved the system he flourished in, his discomfort with the five-step drop, and the quality of players and coaches that surrounded his maiden season.

With the Chiefs, a few of those concerns are taken care of. Coach Todd Haley will likely keep Cassel working out of a shotgun in a pass-first dink and dunk system that threatens vertical and burns with draws often enough to allow Cassel ample space to work in the intermidiate portion of the passing tree.

And, of course, before Cassel was appended to the trade, commentators praised the acquisition of Vrabel, an experienced defender to add cache to a very young roster that in all likelihood will become younger over the course of this offseason.

Either way, Belichick continues to remake the NFL to his liking, or impose his preferences where they can imposed. In some sense, it's not the petty squabbling of Packers and Vikings or Broncos and Raiders.

I'm not trying to paint the transaction as heroic or even ethical. It's not. Despite the Patriots PR department trying to spin the trade as simply bad timing on the part of Tampa and Denver, there is however a familiar method to the gesture.

It's a more a question of when do we start sympathizing again with the bad guys. Or rather realize the distance between ourselves and our enemies may not be that great.