The myth behind the "Patriot Way"

Joan Vennochi wrote a delightful little piece of tripe in today's Boston Globe stating that given the Aaron Hernandez murder case, the New England Patriots should go back to the so-called "Patriot Way" of "valuing character over performance," as first defined by the late Myra Kraft, wife of owner Robert Kraft.

However, to believe in the Patriot Way, you have to believe in its founding myth, what I call "The Myth of Christian Peter." We pick up Vennochi's tale after the Patriots drafted Christian Peter out of Nebraska in 1996, in spite of Peter's troubled past.

"(Myra) took her concerns to her husband. He looked into them, and the Patriots cut Peter loose. It was the first time a drafted player was waived before the start of training camp. "I don't want thugs and hoodlums here," Kraft reportedly told Parcells. But Myra Kraft was the first to take a stand on the issue."

But in order to believe that story, you have to believe the reason the Patriots gave for drafting Peter in the first place ... that they didn't know the extent of his history.

And if you believe that story, you have to believe, incomplete NFL security file or not, no one in the Patriots organization read the newspaper, watched TV or read Sports Illustrated.

Let me put it this way. In April of 1996, I was finishing up graduate school and living in Albany, NY. I had no connection with an NFL team, nor was I about to have one. What I knew about what was going on in the sports world was from the newspaper, magazines, television and the Internet.

But I knew about Christian Peter, and you mean to tell me the New England Patriots, particularly their owner, didn't?

The thing is, though, if the story is about ignorance of a problem that you quickly rectify once it becomes known, that makes a lot better story than the one where it potentially looks like after his more-celebrated teammate with his own history was drafted high in the first round seemingly without angering too many people, you drafted Peter in the fifth round, when no one but hard-core fans were watching, but lo and behold, women's groups apparently were watching, and they weren't pleased.

So you cut him, claim what appears to be beyond all reason that the organization didn't know (and if people in the organization did know, but didn't tell the owner, why were they not fired on the spot?), and get on with building the myth of an organization that does things the right way.