FOXBORO, Mass. — Playing in a Super Bowl is a hectic enough experience for any NFL player.
Add an off-field storyline with the magnitude of “DeflateGate” to the mix, and the two-week break leading up to the big game can become downright overwhelming.
As a team leader and captain, New England Patriots special teams ace Matthew Slater takes it upon himself to make sure these distractions don’t shake the focus of some of his younger teammates.
“Certainly, that’s something that we have addressed and will continue to address,” Slater said Thursday as hordes of reporters descended on the Patriots’ locker room. “I think it’s easy to get caught up in the hoopla, and your families are really excited. But we have a job to do. This is not a vacation for us. This is not a celebration. We have a job to do. I think at the end of the day, that’s what it comes down to, and that’s where our focus needs to be. As a team, to a man, we need to make sure that we have our minds in the right place, our focus in the right place, and that’s playing football. That’s all that matters at the end of the day.”
Slater has been here before. Like a number of players on New England’s current roster, he was a member of the 2011 Patriots team that also reached the Super Bowl — and lost.
That 2011 season was Slater’s breakout campaign — he was voted special teams captain and earned the first Pro Bowl and All-Pro nods of his career — but the sting of its unfulfilled ending still resonates with him.
“I think if you go there, and you come up short, it’s one of the worst feelings you’ll ever experience as an athlete,” Slater said. “Many of us have had that taste, and obviously we don’t want to taste it again. I don’t feel like we’ve accomplished anything — we have accomplished something, I’ll change that, but at the same time, we feel like we’re not done. There’s still some work to be done.”
Have the reports that the Patriots used under-inflated footballs during the AFC Championship Game given Super Bowl week a different feel? Of course they have. The scores of questions each player had to field Thursday on the subject made that fact obvious.
For Slater, though, what awaits the team in Arizona is more than enough to drown out any distraction.
“I can only speak for myself and say no, because it’s the Super Bowl,” he said. “This is a game we’ve worked for our whole careers. It’s not hard to focus on that.”
Thumbnail photo via Robert Hanashiro/USA TODAY Sports Images
