The New England Patriots lost to the Denver Broncos in the AFC Championship last Sunday. This made most football fans happy, since American sports culture has a strange inferiority complex that pushes fans of not-great teams to hate, rather than to admire, great teams. While not terribly productive, this process serves as a partial distraction from the fact that once the playoffs roll around, most fans have to watch great teams instead of their not-so-great teams.

This kind of jealousy is not unique to sports, but it does not appear with this kind of intensity in any other segment of American popular culture. Fans of cult movies, albums and television shows take pride in being part of a select few who “get” a work ignored by the mainstream and sometimes become frustrated when their intimate relationship to a property is sold as a mass-marketed product.

Sam Riche | Tribune News Service

So when people talk about the New England Patriots, who have more wins (209) and Super Bowls (four) than any other NFL franchise this century, and their head coach, Bill Belichick, they talk about how they are dirty cheaters who win because they film opposing teams’ hand signals and deflate footballs. (They were punished for doing the former in 2007 and accused of the latter in 2015.)

It’s perfectly okay to make sure successful institutions follow the rules, but we should not hate Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, because they are a national treasure. In contrast to many football dynasties before them (the University of Miami Hurricanes in the ’80s, Dallas Cowboys in the ’90s, Southern Cal Trojans in the ’00s), the Patriots are not flashy. They have not captured the national consciousness through big personalities and attitude. We pay attention to them because they keep winning, and because we have to watch them when our not-so-great teams stop playing.

But it’s not that the Patriots are just boring. They are more than that. They are cosmically boring. They are boring in ways that surprise you. They are so boring that you can’t help but be impressed.

Belichick is the beating heart of the Patriots’ boringness. He has no time for anything but winning football games, and he makes that fact crystal clear to anyone who believes otherwise.

I do not consider myself a Patriots fan in the traditional sense (I wouldn’t take much interest in them if they were bad) but I love Bill Belichick because he is a beautiful human being, and you should too. Here are five reasons why:

1. His ugly, ugly hoodies

Since Bill Belichick doesn’t care about anything but winning football games, he tends to dress like a drifter. His signature pieces are tarp-like hoodies with sleeves cut just above or below the elbow. He used to do this himself (or have the team’s equipment staff do it, most likely), which produced wonderfully uneven, DIY (do it yourself) cut lines, but it appears that Nike (the NFL’s uniform provider) now makes custom hoodies for him with the sleeves professionally cut near the elbow. They’re not as fun as the DIY hoodies, but it’s still nice to see Belichick leading the pack in his complete disdain for tasteful clothing, even in a decidedly fashion-agnostic profession. Other NFL coaches are lazy; Belichick is avant-garde.

The hoodies pale in comparison to Belichick’s masterpiece, a shiny, gray poncho that looks like a garbage bag with three white stripes on each sleeve. He wears this work of art in a 2014 episode of “Sound FX” (a show on the NFL Network that puts small microphones on players and coaches and shows clips of them saying things to other players and coaches). The clip is difficult to date, but it appears to be from between 2000 and 2002.

He doesn’t wear this poncho anymore, which is a shame, because it’s a sly piece of misdirection. The impression you get is that Bill Belichick doesn’t care about what he’s wearing and doesn’t want other people to care about what he’s wearing, but both of those statements can’t be true in this case, because this shiny, gray poncho is the only thing you can look at when it’s on the screen. It consumes everything around it like a black hole and crumples everywhere, all of the time. You can’t put it on the “ugly/beautiful” scale. It’s its own thing.

2. His relationship with Tom Brady

You may think you love your best friend or significant other in the same way Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady love each other, but you would be wrong, because Belichick and Brady are soulmates—Belichick the master, Brady his muse.

In “Bill Belichick: A Football Life,” a 2011 NFL Films documentary about the Patriots’ 2009 season, you see a meeting between the two, and the chemistry is electric: bad haircuts, ill-fitting jeans, an erotic love of hyper-specific football jargon. Brady takes diligent notes, laughs at Belichick’s joke (something about former Baltimore Ravens safety Ed Reed always looking like he’s guessing more than he is—it’s not very funny, but I’m not a maniac who loves football and nothing else, so what do I know) and I swear, when he looks up from his notepad to address Belichick, there’s something romantic, even lustful, in his eyes.

When he and Belichick discuss various strategies—using detailed terminology about routes and coverages—to deal with Reed, sparks fly. You can hate that they’re both hyper-competitive and hyper-successful or you can take comfort in the fact that these two obsessive lunatics found each other. I choose to do the latter.

3. His jokes

As you might imagine, Bill Belichick is not a funny man. He seems to be aware of that, but sometimes he tries to make jokes, and they fail, spectacularly. During a 2009 preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles, star wide receiver Wes Welker sat out with an injury. His replacement, rookie Julian Edelman, returned a punt for a touchdown. After the return, Belichick tried to make a joke about Wally Pipp (the New York Yankees first basemen who was replaced by future Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig after suffering an injury) to Welker, but Welker didn’t know who Pipp was, so Belichick fumbled his way through an explanation. It went like this:

Belichick: “You ever hear of Wally Pipp?”

Welker: “Wally what?”

Belichick: “Wally Pipp.”

Welker: “Uh-uh.”

Belichick: “You never heard of him?”

Welker: “Uh-uh.”

Belichick: “Well he played first base before Lou Gehrig.”

(Belichick pauses and stares at Welker, hoping he’s beginning to understand the arc of the joke. Welker does not.)

Welker: “Oh, okay.”

Belichick: “Then Lou Gehrig started like…whatever it was…23,000 straight games.”

Welker: “Right. Yeah, uh-huh. The little man.”

Belichick: “That might be the punt return story.”

(End scene)

The thing I love about the way Belichick tells jokes is that he tells jokes like someone who’s 99 percent occupied with football and 1 percent occupied with jokes. That’s how you win at least 10 games for 13 consecutive seasons in a league in which that’s pretty much impossible.

4. His complete indifference toward the media

Belichick is infamous for his terse and uninformative answers during press conferences. Unless the reporter asks about some obscure facet of football history or strategy, Belichick will likely stonewall him. Such as when Welker tore his ACL a week before the 2010 playoffs began:

Reporter: “Your reaction to Wes Welker, and what happened to him in the game, his injury and maybe how that…”

Belichick: “Yeah, we’ve covered that. And we’re off of Houston and we’re on to Baltimore. Players that we have out there, we’ll put together the best plan we can, get our players prepared, get them ready to go, and I know that they’ll all work hard to be ready for Sunday’s game against Baltimore.”

Reporter #2: “Coach, just your reaction to Wes Welker, and how that’s gonna impact, you know…”

Belichick: “Yeah, we’ve already covered it. We’ve already covered it, yeah. We’re done with that. We’re on to Baltimore.”

Reporter #2: “So you don’t want to say anything about Wes Welker…”

Belichick: “I’ve already said it; he’s a great player, and I know he’ll work hard to get back as soon as he can.”

Reporter #2: (Asks about turf at Houston’s Reliant Stadium)

Belichick: “Yeah, we’re on to Baltimore. We’re done with the regular season. This is the postseason. We’re on to Baltimore.”

Reporter #2: (Tries, once again, to make Belichick comment on Welker)

Belichick: “I respect the fans, and I respect you and all that, but, right now, we’re on to Houston…I mean, we’re on to Baltimore. We’re in the postseason. We’re done with the regular season games.”

This is what happens when someone uses 99 percent of his brain to win football games and one percent to answer questions during a press conference.

5. He can’t set the clock in his car

Bill Belichick can do many things. He can create an organization that flattens the egos of men who were bred to be cocky. He can groom a sixth-round draft pick into arguably the greatest quarterback the NFL has ever seen. He can outsmart the world’s smartest football minds week in and week out.

But one thing Bill Belichick, the man who has made a mockery of the NFL’s quest for parity, cannot do, is adjust the clock in his car. In “A Football Life,” Belichick complains of being mystified by his car’s electronic dashboard. It can’t take more than like three buttons to adjust that clock, but Belichick can’t find them.

It’s kind of beautiful, actually. Goliath, felled by David’s slingshot, if only for a moment.

He fumbles with the touch screen for a few seconds, puzzles over the lack of a “clock setting,” and, stumped, exits the car and heads towards his office to draw up whatever special teams formation will stump his next opponent. Because that’s what happens when you use 99 percent of your brain to win football games and 1 percent for everything else.