Since having throat surgery on Thursday morning, I’ve watched ESPN almost nonstop. I’ve been inundated with sports info, thanks to the fact that moving anything feels like getting punched in the neck repeatedly. Since I haven’t composed a logical thought on much of anything since having my tonsils removed, I’m going to mini-column on three ubiquitous ESPN news topics. Call it riffing, if you will, on the Patriots, the Mitchell Report and Rich Rodriguez.

The Patriots skip the Super Bowl and are treated to a tour of heaven by God himself.

Okay, we get it. The Patriots are great. In fact, they’re super-great; fantastically, incredibly, demonstrably, inexorably, undeniably, super-great. Shut up about it already. Extensively analyzing anything they do in the last two weeks (other than lose) will be needless overkill. They’ve already got homefield advantage and the first round bye – they’ve already been analyzed to the point where we can predict which nostril each player favors. Let the topic rest until the playoffs, when their wins actually mean something.

They’re becoming the Brett Favre of football teams – they do so many amazing things every week that people who aren’t giddy die-hards are sick of hearing about it. It’s gotten to the point where I want them to perfect the season instead of lose. If they manage to drop any of the games, there will be no end of it anywhere until the next football season starts. And I don’t want to hear any more about the Patriots than I have to.

The Mitchell Report: Steroids take baseball straight to hell, with Roger Clemens conducting the train.

The point was to cleanse baseball of steroids and to discourage steroid use in general. I think it’s going to work pretty well, as those who have done steroids are getting painted in an exaggeratedly terrible light. Now that many of the questionable claims are being backed up by the accused as true, it’s turning Mitchell from the bad guy into the “bad but right” guy. I know the players say the accusations are only partly true, but I have to believe they’re covering their backs, minimizing the damage, doing spin control, etc. When Andy Pettite said Mitchell’s allegations about him were true, that pretty much sealed the deal for me on whether or not I believed it.