Arian Foster using Dan Shaughnessy’s Texans-bashing column as motivation

Arian Foster is using the disparaging words of a sports writer to motivate him for Sunday’s playoff game at New England.

A day after the Houston Texans beat the Cincinnati Bengals 19-13 to advance to the divisional round of the playoffs, Dan Shaughnessy wrote a column for The Boston Globe that bashes the Texans.

Shaughnessy calls the Texans “frauds” and says Sunday’s game will be a “layup” for the Patriots. Here are the first three paragraphs from his column:

The 2012-13 New England Patriots just became the first team in NFL history to get back-to-back byes before advancing to the conference championship game.

Could this get any easier?

I mean, seriously? The planets are aligned and the tomato cans are in place. The fraudulent Houston Texans are the only team standing between the New England Patriots and a trip to the AFC Championship game. All the Patriots have to do is beat the terrible Texans. One week from today. At Gillette Stadium.

You can read the entire column here, though that gives you the gist of it.

Those first three paragraphs apparently caught the eye of Foster, because the Texans star running back has made it his temporary Twitter avatar.

Bill Belichick generally goes to great lengths to ensure his players are not giving opposing teams bulletin board material. He even punished Wes Welker two years ago for mocking Rex Ryan’s foot fetish in a press conference.

It’s hard enough keeping his own players from firing up opponents. Now he has to worry about media members screwing that up. The bad news for the Patriots is that if we go by Shaughnessy’s history of forecasting sports events, things won’t go too well for them on Sunday.

H/T Chris Law