Are Leases on Penthouses About to Expire?

Are the NFL’s two best teams headed for a fall?

It seems to be shaping up that way as the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles, Super Bowl opponents only six months ago, try to sturdy themselves through some of the bumpiest off-seasons in memory.

Whether it’s Eagle receiver Terrell Owens getting sent home from training camp this week after an argument with Coach Andy Reid, or Patriot linebacker Tedy Bruschi opting to sit out the season after suffering a stroke less than two weeks after the Super Bowl, the hits keep on coming.

The bad news is piling up in both camps. The Eagles lost receiver Todd Pinkston for the season, and were without running back Brian Westbrook for the first part of camp because of a contract holdout.

The Patriots, meanwhile, are trying to cope with the loss of coordinators Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel, who left after last season to become head coaches at Notre Dame and Cleveland, respectively. They’ve lost cornerback Ty Law to free agency, and linebacker Ted Johnson to retirement -- developments that could happen any off-season but might be especially painful now.

It’s amazing enough that these teams have accomplished what they have in this era of parity. The Patriots have won three of the past four Super Bowls, are attempting to become the first three-peat champion in the Super Bowl era, and the first to win four in five years.

In the past four years, they have turned sixth-round quarterback Tom Brady into a star and transformed former retread Bill Belichick into a coaching legend.

The Eagles, a model of consistency in the regular season, reached the past four NFC championship games, finally breaking through to get to the Super Bowl last season despite a leg injury that cost playmaker Owens two months.

Staying on top isn’t easy. Two years ago, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Oakland Raiders fell fast and hard only months after they met in Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego.

Among the swirling controversies then were ones involving Raider center Barret Robbins, who missed the Super Bowl after going AWOL the night before; Tampa Bay’s Keyshawn Johnson, who was dismissed from the team the following season by Coach Jon Gruden; and fellow Buccaneer receiver Keenan McCardell, a contract holdout in 2004 who was eventually shipped to San Diego.

“What happens to the teams at the top, every issue that might be ordinary in nature is magnified,” said former Tampa Bay general manager Rich McKay, who now runs the Atlanta Falcons. “Because of that, if you make a mistake or two in one of those areas they can really turn into big problems. If you’re on the way up -- or a team that is not on the radar screen -- you get more free passes.”

McKay said the pressure was a byproduct of extra scrutiny by the media and heightened expectation of fans.

“What the Eagles and Patriots have done a great job of is managing issues, not getting swallowed whole by them,” he said. “It comes from the top, their stability, and the way they make their decisions year in and year out the same way.

“They may not get them all right, but there’s the same thought process behind them all. That consistency has served them well.”

Sometimes, however, even consistent leadership from the top can be overshadowed by the difficulty of keeping players pointed in the same direction. The Eagles, for instance, had a hard enough time getting Owens into camp, let alone keeping him happy and focused while he was there.

“It’s out of hand now,” Denver receiver Jerry Rice, Owens’ former teammate in San Francisco, said this week. “It’s out of control. You’re talking about a team that went to the Super Bowl last season. They need to be thinking about what they have to do this season to get back to the Super Bowl. They don’t need this right now. It’s just unfortunate.”

Although he never won a Super Bowl, former Raider receiver Tim Brown has seen plenty of good players implode under the pressure. He has seen them lose focus, and he has seen the effect it has on a team.

“How many people you know have prosperity and all of sudden things go crazy? It’s not that unusual,” Brown told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “They stop doing the things they did that got them that prosperity.

“In football, you’re not dealing with one person, you’re dealing with 53 different people.... You’re still going to have guys come into the locker room saying, ‘Hey, we just won a championship!’ It’s a tough, tough job for a coach to be able to get those guys back on track.”

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Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a warning to the NFL on Thursday that the league could forget about getting public money for a stadium in its quest to return to the Los Angeles market.

Seeing as the league has made it abundantly clear it’s not asking for public money, it makes me think one of two things is happening:

Villaraigosa is truly out of touch on the issue, or he knows something about the latest deal that the rest of us don’t.

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Tennessee rookie Adam “Pacman” Jones, the troubled cornerback who is holding out, ripped into teammates this week for not supporting him. His comments weren’t just pointed, he named names.

Evidently, that isn’t winning him a lot of friends among the Titans.

Said defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth, a target of Jones’ diatribe: “If you look at it, [Jones] has been more in prison than he’s been on the practice field.”