If you wonder why that snarling NFL linebacker just blew past your precious little Alexis for an autograph, you can blame it on the kind of insanity we're seeing around the New England Patriots right now.

To too many of us -- sports writers, analysts or supposed Patriots fans -- the Super Bowl is a zero-sum game. Win and we would step in front of arrows for you. Lose and you're the biggest choker since the Hillside Strangler.

Tom Brady is hearing all that ugliness now. So is Wes Welker. So is Bill Belichick. They don't deserve it. They don't deserve anything near it.

"You blew this Super Bowl," Boston Globe sports writer Eric Wilbur wrote of Brady on Monday. "You denied your coach No. 4. You let down your teammates."

This is the same Brady who broke a Super Bowl record with 16 straight completions during the game. The same Brady who's taken the Pats to five of these big games. The one who was on the cusp of tying Joe Montana with four Super Bowl wins.

And you wonder why Brady lives in L.A.

"Epic fail," Kerry J. Byrne wrote of Belichick on ColdHardFootballFacts.com. "Epic failures from one end of the organization to the other."

This is the same Belichick Byrne had previously praised for directing a team that had given fans "a stunning string of colossal victories, big moments, all-time records and memorable games for the ages."

The Patriots should not renew Welker's contract, suggested Luke Hughes of Boston's NESN.com. "It's a hard sell to start with and an even harder one when you consider that [fourth-quarter] drop," he wrote.

Let me get this straight. You're going to get rid of the man who led the NFL in receiving this season, everybody's first-team All-Pro, because he couldn't haul in a ball that was high and over the wrong shoulder?

Apparently somebody agreed with Hughes. Eight thousand Butterfingers were dumped in Copley Square on Tuesday to mock Welker.

Tough crowd.