You’re a big Patriots fan. Which makes you a huge Tom Brady fan.

His pain was your pain, when, in the first quarter of the first game of this 2008 season, he went down with a knee injury that sidelined him for the rest of the year.

As a Patriots fan, you want Tom Brady to be healthy. You wish him all the best. You care about his well-being. And so, naturally, you want to know how he’s doing, how his surgery went, how his rehab is coming along.

The Patriots don’t want to tell you.

Which is tantamount to telling you they don’t care about you, the paying customer.

All the Patriots feel you need to know are the price of a ticket, the cost of parking, and the hours Patriot Place is open for your shopping and dining pleasure.

The status of the star quarterback, the 2008 NFL MVP?

None of your business.

Let us contrast this approach with that of the St. Louis Rams, who’ll be coming to Foxboro on Sunday with star running back Steven Jackson hurting.

How do we know he’s hurting?

He said so. So did Rams coach Jim Haslett.

“Steven Jackson had an MRI today on his quad,” Haslett announced at his news conference Monday. “It was a slight strain. He’ll be limited this week, but he should be fine for the game.” On Wednesday, Jackson was asked how his leg was feeling.

“The leg feels good,” he said. “We’re not quite sure, we’re still going to see what’s going to happen for Sunday, but I was able to do some rehab work with our weight coach, do some light lifting, and some light pool work.”

Contrast that with what the super-secret Patriots — hey, those guys are so paranoid, they probably think opposing teams secretly videotape their offensive and defensive signals; as if anybody would cheat like that — had to say about injuries to several of their players following Monday night’s 41-7 blasting of the Broncos.

Here are some excerpts from coach Bill Belichick’s Q&A with the media:

Q. What went into the decision to I.R. Laurence Maroney?

A. It was a problem with his shoulder that we thought wasn’t going to resolve this year.

Q. Will he need surgery, or is it something that’s going to take time to heal on its own?

A. You know I am not going to get into that. I really appreciate you asking. (Editorial comment: Yeah, right. Sure. Just like Bill Clinton loved being asked about having sex with Monica Lewinsky.)

We will treat the player however we feel is the best way to treat him, whatever that is. We will do everything we can for the player to rehabilitate and get back to 100 percent. But I am not going to get into what each individual treatment is.

Q. Sammy Morris also went down with a knee in the second half. What is his status? Does it seem serious, and can you tell us a little bit about it?

A. I really can’t say too much about it. It’s the day after the game. We will see how it goes. When we go to practice tomorrow, we’ll see where all the players are. Some will go out there, try to practice, and are able to practice, and there will be other guys that we’ll find out they are not quite ready to go tomorrow. Then we will go through the same thing on Thursday. That is really pretty much the way it works. So we will just have to wait and see on a day-to-day basis how everybody is doing. So we’ll call Sammy day-to-day.”

What that is called is stonewalling. Deliberate obfuscation.

Which, in turn, leads to speculation.

The Boston Herald reported yesterday that Brady has had three procedures on his left knee since his surgery Oct. 6 because of complications arising from an infection. Brady has acknowledged on his Web site he’s had one.

ESPN reported yesterday that the Patriots’ powers that be are “upset” because they wanted Brady to have his surgery in Boston rather than Los Angeles.

The Patriots are saying nothing.

Unless Belichick decides to be forthcoming today, which would be as big an upset as the Bengals and Lions meeting in the Super Bowl this season.

These are not state secrets we’re talking about. Discussing the extent of a player’s injury and the treatment he’s undergoing — especially in the case of a player who’s out for the season — isn’t the equivalent of enabling Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

A simple, straightforward statement would suffice.

Tom Brady is the NFL MVP. The Patriots’ hopes of returning to the Super Bowl are dependent upon his return to health. So when he has a procedure related to a football injury, the team ought to say what it was, and what, as the doctors see it, are the ramifications.

Veteran strong safety Rodney Harrison got hurt Monday night and had to be carted off the field with what appeared to be, at the age of 35, a career-threatening injury. That’s a shame. He’s a talented, popular player.

Yet, when he was placed on I.R. on Wednesday, all the Pats said was that “he will miss the remainder of the 2008 season with a thigh injury.”

Harrison was hurt on the final play of the third quarter, when the Patriots had a 34-7 lead. The Rams lost Jackson in the fourth quarter of their 34-14 rout of Dallas. After which, Haslett was kicking himself for not having taken Jackson out of the game.

“I wanted to get him out,” Haslett acknowledged. “I wanted to get Marc [Bulger, the Rams’ QB] out, I wanted to get Torry [Holt, WR] out. I actually wanted to get a couple of the guards out and get some of the younger players in.

“We had a big enough lead that we actually could have got a quarter’s worth of work with those guys. It would have been nice to get those guys in, so I kind of screwed that up.”

Belichick would give you Brady’s medical history before saying something like that.

jdonalds@projo.com