Bob Cook

Pro football in 2007 will be remembered as a season in which a haughty, arrogant organization got the smug wiped off its face after a long, spectacular run.

On the field, that would be the New England Patriots. Off the field, that would be the NFL itself. In losing the Super Bowl, the Patriots’ story is obvious. But as the Patriots’ off-the-field conduct comes back as a story, the NFL will take more painful and obvious body blows than it already took during the 2007 season, except that now there aren’t amazing on-field stories to provide cover.

If 2007 was the year of the Pursuit of Perfection, the rejuvenation of Brett Favre, the unprecedented regular-season excellence of the Indianapolis Colts (a record five straight 12-win seasons) and the emergence of a new superstar in Adrian Peterson (Vikings’ version), it also was the year of Michael Vick, Pacman Jones, the Cincinnati Bengals’ first-name basis with the local police, Sean Taylor’s tragic death, the NFL Network cable wars, and the league and its players association seemingly turning its back on the decrepitude of its retirees.

And Spygate, which could bring both the Patriots and the NFL down in a hurry if one U.S. senator’s outrage leads to a substantive rethinking of how the league handled the scandal.

Both New England and the NFL were at a peak in the recently concluded season, so it stands to reason each has nowhere to go but down, though perhaps if the Patriots went 10-6 in the regular season and won the Super Bowl, that would actually be a step up from 18-1 and honking the last game.

Certainly, the NFL is making a good living riding the fortune of the Patriots. New England’s undefeated run drew eyes to the league as nothing else in recent memory could — more than 30 million pairs of TV eyes for each of four regular season games, and a record 97.5 million pairs for the Super Bowl. 2007 brought back the idea of a dynasty, which always attracts a curious crowd. And if the Patriots were one that people loved to hate — hey, it doesn’t matter why people are tuning in, just that they do.

As if coach Bill Belichick’s guarded, humorless demeanor or quarterback Tom Brady’s tabloid-level celebrity wasn’t enough to portray the Patriots as better than you, there was the televised image of supermodel/Brady girlfriend Gisele Bundchen in a luxury box, seriously sipping a glass of wine like she was sitting in an upscale bistro, trying hard to impress the crowd by looking like she wasn’t trying to impress the crowd. Rag Jessica Simpson all you want, but at least she showed up for Tony Romo’s game wearing a Cowboys jersey, and appeared to be aware she was in a football stadium.

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That the Patriots lost the Super Bowl to the New York Giants makes both New England and the NFL a more fascinating and memorable story for 2007. After all, it’s not often a team from New York becomes America’s adopted underdog.

But the Patriots’ perceived arrogance also was a result of the scandal dubbed Spygate, in which a New England employee was caught during the season’s opening game illegally filming the New York Jets’ sideline, and for which Belichick paid a $500,000 fine, and for which the Patriots also had to fork over $250,000, plus get docked a first-round draft pick.

The scandal seemed dead and buried after commissioner Roger Goodell declared, despite other allegations of spying by the Patriots, that the case was settled, and that all evidence had been destroyed. But like the Patriots’ arrogant karma came back to haunt them at the Super Bowl, so did the arrogant karma of a league whose troubles didn’t seem to hit as hard as they did in other sports.

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