It's Over, Patriots

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the column Shank has been dying to write for the better part of a decade.

Championship days are all over for the Patriots

DENVER — So there. In the end, it was about talent and merit, instead of myth and legacy. It turns out that an appearance in the Super Bowl is not an entitlement.

In the end, the overachieving, house-of-cards Patriots were simply not good enough to go to the Meadowlands for Super Bowl XLVIII. Not even close. The amazing part is that a lot of folks actually believed this team was going back to the big game.

Shank writes a pro-forma paragraph here and sentence there 'congratulating' the Patriots for what they've done this season, then devotes the rest of the column shedding crocodile tears and mounting nearly every criticism possible, as the Patriot's championship years are now long behind them.

It's worth noting the effort that Shank seems to put into epitaph columns such as this one. Hell, he probably had half of it written before kickoff.