Osi Umenyiora ended his holdout with the Giants only to demand a trade, and one of the teams that is rumored to be in the running for a trade is the New England Patriots.

An interesting note on the Umenyiora-to-New England Patriots connection is that before the 2008 Super Bowl, Umenyiora created a fake controversy by accurately explaining that the Patriots offensive lineman Matt Light plays dirty.

Naturally with the two weeks and nothing to talk about before the Super Bowl, the media liked to write stories about how, “A Giants player slammed the Patriots!!!!” and how “The Giants are giving the Patriots ‘bulletin-board material’.” The “bulletin-board” material must not have worked well, because the Patriots ended up losing. I guess their coach Bill Belichick didn’t mention what Umenyiora had said, otherwise the Patriots would have been sufficiently motivated to play for a win in the Super Bowl.

To put into perspective the importance of teams making comments about the other team in order to motivate that team to actually give a damn about winning the Super Bowl, AOL News said at the time:

Look, the issue isn’t if Light’s a dirty player or not, it’s giving the Patriots something — anything — to post on their wall-sized bulletin board.

Big Blue View blog told Umenyiora to shut up (though they didn’t specifically mention the impact his comments would have on motivating the Patriots for a game they otherwise wouldn’t care about). Its true that Unenyiora probably should have shut up, simply because its a classless thing to do to whine about your own failings as a defensive lineman and blame it on the other side playing dirty. But it seems Umenyiora is now (and over the past few years) playing football well enough to join the cheating dirtbags known as the Patriots. Wish him and his mouth good luck where ever he ends up.

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