SPORTS BETTING NEWS

Bill Belichick is famously unsentimental. That, really, is his legacy as a football coach. Herm Edwards shouted "You play to win the game!" but that was just fun talk. It is Belichick who has lived those words during his amazing career as a coach.

He callously releases and trades beloved players if he thinks it will help the team win. He benches quarterbacks if he thinks it will help the team win. He videotapes the opposition sidelines if he thinks it will help the team win. He has players change position, he has no use for stars, he tears up the team's game plan week after week and replaces it with a new game plan, a specific game plan that, like the prizes on "The Dating Game," was chosen just for you.

This is what Belichick is all about: Winning football games without sentiment. Like Michael Corleone says in The Godfather, "It's business." If the Packers were about Vince Lombardi's pursuit of perfection, and the Steelers were about the Steel Curtain, and the 49ers were about the West Coast Offense ... the Patriots are about business. They are about Tom Brady, I suppose, but they won their first Super Bowl when he was still learning, and their second when they had the best defense in the NFL (and a middling offense). They are about good team defense, I suppose, but they haven't played truly great defense in a while. The truth is they're about winning games. Whatever that takes. It's business.

With that in mind, I fully understand Belichick's decision to go for it on 4th and 2 in Sunday's night's remarkable Patriots-Colts game. You already know the situation: The Patriots led by six, they were deep in their own territory -- the first down marker was at their own 30 -- and there were just a few ticks more than two minutes left.

The conventional choice there is to punt. In fact, "conventional choice" does not begin to describe it. It was the obvious choice. The incontestable choice. I suspect 31 other NFL coaches would have punted there without even thinking twice about it. I suspect that had Belichick decided to punt there, nobody -- not one interviewer, not one talk show host, not even one radio caller -- would have second-guessed him there (and anyone who would second-guess him there would have been mocked and told to learn about football). I simply cannot remember any team going for it in a similar situation. You punt the ball and make Peyton Manning and the Colts go 70 yards to try to score the game-winning touchdown. It's as obvious as bringing Mariano Rivera in the game in the 9th. Read More at Sports Gambling Blog