Patriots fitted for black hats

What was bad for the Cowboys, Dolphins and Redskins will wind up being good for the NFL.

When New England rolled over those teams -- and if what happened in those games doesn’t constitute running up the score, what does? -- the Patriots gave the league something it has lacked for a while:

A villain.

Ever since free agency arrived in the early 1990s, and with the popularity of fantasy football, rivalries don’t mean as much. Players come and go so frequently that even pulling for your own team is like rooting for familiar laundry.

Then along come the Patriots. At first, from a national perspective, they didn’t inspire strong feelings one way or another. They won three Super Bowls with mechanized efficiency and, by design, were as bland off the field as Coach Bill Belichick’s charcoal hoodie.

Things are different this season, and it started with a video camera. When the Patriots got caught taping the defensive signals of the New York Jets and were slapped down by the NFL, it was a momentary embarrassment for New England -- plus a stiff penalty -- but, as it turns out, also bad news for their opponents.

The Patriots instantly went from a boring beast to as polarizing a franchise as the Cowboys, Raiders and Steelers ever were. Love them or despise them, you can’t ignore them.

Privately, the Patriots couldn’t be happier about all that negative energy. Let the accusations fly. Keep telling them how their Super Bowl victories were tainted. Call them tapeworms or their coach Belicheat.

All that does is feed their furnace. That hefty NFL fine will wind up being the best $500,000 Belichick has ever spent, because it has provided him with bulletin-board material every week.

No one believes in us. Everyone thinks we cheated to win. Well, world, get a load of this defensive hand signal.

Belichick has always been an outsider in the fraternity of NFL coaches. He doesn’t care about making friends with those guys. He went long stretches when he didn’t talk to Bill Parcells or Eric Mangini, with whom he once worked the closest, so do you think he’s worried about embarrassing Joe Gibbs? Do you think he was fretting about how it might look when the Patriots went for it on fourth down when they were beating the Redskins 38-0 and 45-0? Not a chance.

Gibbs, by the way, handled that as well as he possibly could have. He praised Belichick’s coaching after the game and said he didn’t have a problem with any decisions the Patriots made. Some of his players groused, but Gibbs knows it’s all part of the business.

Besides, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The rivalry between Gibbs and Belichick goes back more than 20 years.

In 1984, when the Redskins were coming off back-to-back Super Bowl appearances, Belichick was a linebackers coach of the up-and-coming New York Giants.

As they always did, the Redskins ran the same few plays over and over and challenged teams to stop them. They didn’t bother to disguise what they were doing. But in a game at Giants Stadium on Oct. 28, 2004, New York made some nifty defensive adjustments and walked away with a 37-13 victory.

The story in NFL circles was that word filtered back to Gibbs after that game that the young Giants defensive coaches were boasting about outsmarting him. Everyone has an ego, especially NFL coaches, so Gibbs had to have filed that away. And, who knows, maybe some time over the last two decades Gibbs seized an opportunity to fire back a shot.

Either way, Belichick doesn’t seem to care. It’s his team against the world, and clearly that’s working out just fine for the Patriots.

As anyone who covers the NFL knows, there are coaches around the league who can’t wait to have Belichick taken down a notch or two.

There just aren’t many teams capable of doing it.

For example, considering the way they crushed their last three opponents, it’s natural to think the Patriots will happily pulverize the overmatched Jets when the teams meet Dec. 16 in Foxborough. After all, it was Mangini and the Jets who reportedly tipped off the NFL about the videotaping shenanigans.

There is, however, risk-reward to factor. Former Steelers Coach Bill Cowher, whose team lost two AFC championship games to the Patriots, said the Patriots are playing a dangerous game by keeping quarterback Tom Brady in games after the outcome has been decided.

“I just think you have to be careful, because at some point, if this continues, someone’s going to take a cheap shot,” Cowher said.

“They’re going to say, ‘The heck with it. I may do it.’ And is it worth subjecting your players to that if it comes to that?”

An interesting scenario could be if the Patriots are 15-0 entering their Dec. 29 game at the Giants. Tom Coughlin’s team doesn’t do everything well, but the Giants do know how to get to opposing quarterbacks. They lead the league with 28 sacks.

If a perfect regular-season record were at stake, would the Patriots keep Brady in the game?

All that is mere conjecture now. The Patriots are focused on the task at hand. And millions of NFL fans -- New England supporters and detractors alike -- are focused on them.

--

sam.farmer@latimes.com