Dumbest sports argument of 2017?

As they say on the radio: No more calls, we have a winner.

It’s this business – this, this … argument – over whether the 2017 Patriots should “go for” an undefeated season.

Those who espouse this point of view believe an undefeated season would somehow be a “feather in the cap” of the first football dynasty of the 21st century.

They believe it would deliver yet another gotcha moment to the masses beyond New England who despise the Patriots.

They believe it would make for yet another Pepto-Bismol night for NFL czar Roger Goodell.

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They are nuts.

As Vito Corleone said during the big sit-down with the heads of the five families, “How did things ever get so far?”

When did it become a goal, a mission, a Vision Quest, to turn a season, any season, into a march to 19-0? And why does it matter?

Is it because it would somehow heal the wounds of 2007, when the angry, Spygate-penalized Patriots ran the board before being upended by the New York Giants in the Super Bowl? Really?

What it would do, I guess, and this would be a good thing, is smoosh a Boston cream pie into the faces of aging members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, who each season climb out of their La-Z-Boys and pop open the champagne as soon as the last remaining undefeated team has bit the dust. We’re all a little tired of the ’72 Dolphins.

But it’s not as though Patriots Coach Bill Belichick has a secret “Project Undefeated” plan in his desk drawer and is mulling whether to put it into action. If he did, maybe he has a “15-1 Plan,” a “14-2 Plan,” and so on. Which is nonsense.

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What he does have is a plan to assemble the best team possible and craft weekly game plans that serve the dual purpose of maximizing his manpower and exploiting the opposition’s weaknesses. That’s pretty much what coaches have been doing since the days of George Halas and Curly Lambeau, and Belichick has done it to aplomb during his days with the Patriots.

Fate brought Belichick and Tom Brady together, and together they have coached and quarterbacked the Patriots to seven trips to the Super Bowl, and five championships.

The plan will be to win every game. Duh. But you can only win one game at a time, with one game plan at a time. And while I have never been invited to a Bill Belichick players meeting, I’m confident he’s never opened training camp with an impassioned speech about the glory of going undefeated.

By now we’ve all taken a course in Introductory Belichick. And we learned, right off, that the focus is always on the next game of the schedule. Not last week’s game. Not the game that will be played in two, three or nine weeks. It’s the next game.

At some point during Rosevelt Colvin’s days with the Patriots, I asked the Indianapolis native about an upcoming game against the Colts at the RCA Dome. All I wanted was a rehashing of old stories, such as how he used to sell popcorn at the RCA Dome when he was a kid, but he wouldn’t go there because he wouldn’t be going there for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t the next game on the schedule.

A week later he happily talked about returning home to play the Colts, because the Colts were the next game on the schedule.

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When there’s a Week 1 on the schedule, Week 2 doesn’t exist. When there’s a Week 2, there’s no Week 3. That’s the way they roll, the way they should roll, and it makes a 16-0 regular season run nothing more than a hazy, lazy summertime sports “argument” to roll out when we’re all tired of talking about middle relief and what the hoop rookies are up to in Vegas.

After the ’07 season, after David Tyree held onto the ball, after the Pats’ bid for perfection was shown the door, somebody down Foxbororough way came up with the really bad idea of ordering up a “16-0” banner to commemorate the regular- season run. The banner always looked tacky and out of place, and it was finally taken down. I think it’s now hanging in the bathroom where the footballs were deflated.

The problem with that banner was it didn’t make anyone happily nostalgic for the 2007 regular season. It served as a painful reminder of what went wrong in the Super Bowl.

No rational Pats fan cares about 16-0 or 19-0. Right now 1-0 is the goal.


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