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Pierce ready to take centre stage in media event of the season

NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — The New England Patriots' pursuit of the National Football League's first 16-0 season has catapulted this weekend's meeting with the New York Giants into a US media event - and Bermudian Giants star Antonio Pierce is right in the middle of it.

The Patriots face the Giants in East Rutherford, New Jersey, attempting to become the first team since 1972 to win all their games, with New England quarterback Tom Brady and receiver Randy Moss poised to set league records for scoring and other marks already shattered.

Despite facing opponents on the brink of breaking a series of league records, linebacker Pierce dismissed a reporter's suggestion that the Giants might be viewing the fixture with some trepidation. "Nobody fears anybody in this league," Pierce said.

While each team is locked into its post-season seeding and gains nothing by winning, tomorrow's game will be the first to air on three US television networks at the same time, a situation Patriots coach Bill Belichick compared with the network simulcast of the US President's annual address to Congress.

"It'll be like the State of the Union, on every channel," Belichick said yesterday in a televised news conference.

The league took the unprecedented action two days ago, placing the game on both CBS and NBC, as well as keeping it on the NFL Network.

The action came after pressure from US legislators concerned that a pricing dispute between the NFL and several of the nation's largest cable providers threatened to keep the historic game off the air in all but the 40 percent of about 110 million US television homes that receive the NFL's channel, plus the New York and Boston metropolitan areas.

It will be the first simulcast since CBS and NBC showed the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967.

The last NFL team to win all their games were the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who won 14 regular-season and three play-off games to finish 17-0.

"We are trying to approach it the same way we approach every game, and get our people ready to play and put forth the best effort we can," Giants coach Tom Coughlin told reporters yesterday.

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