The New England Patriots, led by head coach Bill Belechick, give off them image of old-regime, old-school football mindset. Every player, coach, and assistant manager has a place and job on the team (apparently even the assistant football deflater); essentially every single person is a cog in the machine. From the team president of operations all the way down to the field maintenance workers, everyone knows their place and totes the company line, and while this theory of management does make Belechick seems curmudgeon-y, it works. The Patriots organization has an image as one of the most clean-cut and professional organizations not only in the NFL but American sports in general.
The Patriots is the exact philosophy and image that the NFL front office and especially their league commissioner Roger Goodell are looking for, successful but clean cut and family friendly, which is exactly why to the chagrin of that front office, the Seattle Seahawks have made waves in almost the exact opposite of manner.
The Seattle Seahawks are the yang to the Patriots yin when it comes to image. They are the Detroit Pistons to Michael Jordan's Bulls or Larry Bird's Celtics. The Seahawks are big, loud, brash, and super-talented, and they know it.
The Seahawks don't care that they have embraced this exact opposite image as the bad boys of football, with all the smack talk, all the nick-names for their defense, and all the rebellious steak that comes with it because they know they can and have backed it up with more talent than most any opposing team knows how to deal with. The NFL front office might hate that the Seahawks are not the most family-friendly franchise around, but Seattle is just to good right now for them to do anything about it. They are the defending Super Bowl Champs, and for good reason they will be back on the field going for their second straight on Sunday.
These team images, one as the clean-cut, bring your lunchpail to work and get the job done team from the northeast, and the other as the loud brash bastion of football from the upper north-west coast, hide the real personalities of their biggest players however, namely the personalities of Tom Brady and Marshawn Lynch.
Tom Brady, to those that might not follow football closely, seems as the perfect fit to Belechick's system and the Patriots organizations. Cerebral and calculating, with a drive to win rivaled by few. But those more familiar with the NFL know a very different Tom Brady that is complete contrast to the organization he plays for. Brady is one of the most talented quarterbacks to have ever played the game, appearing in five Super Bowls so far with his sixth this Sunday and already winning three. It could even be argued that he is only about two miraculous plays away from being perfect in Super Bowls. But that competitive drive also leads to his hot-tempered personality that spills onto the field continually. Brady is known as one of the biggest trash-talkers in the league and has been fined on several different occasions, including this season for improper language on the field being picked up by broadcast microphones. But this isn'e the only super star in this star studded Super Bowl that seems to clash with the culture of his team; enter Marshawn Lynch.
The Seahawks are loud and talk more smack than almost any other team in the league, on and off the field. The biggest problem for those that don't like this way of conducting business (looking at you Goodell) is at least for the moment, they can back it up.
Sometimes perceptions can play to the advantage of a team, especially when preparing for a game as big as the Super Bowl, but sometimes they cloud how the media and fans look at individual players on a team and make them whitewash a entire team with one image. No matter how much a player does or doesn't talk to the media however, both Brady and Lynch will get to let their actions speak louder than their words come Sunday.
