Hey, 1.3 billion Chinese, how 'bout the Pats?

Between his electrical engineering and computer science classes at MIT, Tian He is studying the mind-bending complexities of football.

And if a plan by the New England Patriots succeeds, the 21-year-old Bejing-born techno whiz will soon be connecting a sizable fraction of China's billion-plus residents to Patriots Nation. The hope is that the Chinese might read about Pats games and eventually watch the team on TV, buy its gear, and perhaps in a few years, attend exhibition games.

The Patriots hired He last fall to write a weekly Web log, translating the lingo and culture of a sport that, to the uninitiated, can seem like group wrestling.

Football is ''all brand new" to the Chinese population, says Fred Kirsch, Patriots director of interactive media. Though He's blog started out almost noiselessly last year, recording only 200 or so hits a week, views have increased 10-fold. ''The only place you can go is up," Kirsch says.

Kirsch chose He for the blog job after interviewing a dozen candidates from MIT's Chinese student association, testing their ability to translate articles into Chinese and reading aloud in Mandarin, China's national spoken language.

''Luckily, I know Chinese, and I like football," says He, who moved from China to Knoxville, Tenn., with his parents at age 9 and is a college senior this year. Having been forced by his mother to read Chinese elementary school textbooks as a child paid off, and He later got hooked on reading Chinese novels, though he modestly rates his Chinese as ''third-grade level."

Under a family friend's influence, He began watching college football as a young teenager. He rooted for the underdog Patriots in the 1997 Super Bowl. But it was seeing the team's victory over Oakland in a January 2002 snowstorm, to advance to the conference championship game, that ushered him toward fan-dom.

As the Patriots' official blogger, He views most games on TV while scribbling notes in Chinese, though the Pats did bring him to last season's opening game and Super Bowl as well as Sept. 8's opener.

He devoted most of last season's blogs to game summaries, while including blurbs on history, introductions to various American cities, and a discourse on the going rate of a Super Bowl ring selling on eBay. His morning-of-the-Super Bowl diary, written from Jacksonville, winds its way from descriptions of the Eagles stars' favorite foods to his asking coach Bill Belichick about lessons learned from Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu.

Many Chinese ''want to learn American culture, and football is part of that," says He, who travels to Beijing and Shanghai every year or two.

But even for a devoted fan versed in both Chinese and American culture and language, conveying the drama and excitement of a sport that is uniquely American from field to computer screen can be tough. Football lacks the in-country presence of even newer sports like golf and Formula One auto racing. Just finding the words to talk about football is a struggle, with a sport vocabulary that is still evolving.

Better communications are probably on the way. The Patriots began partnering with the Chinese communications company Sina.com in April and launched a Chinese Patriots site in July. The site carries a link to He's blog. But the partners are entering the Chinese market cautiously, so far without advertising or publicly promoting their website and He's blog.

''We both realize it's going to be a slow process," Kirsch says.

To add to the appeal of their product, the Patriots have also enlisted Shanghai-born cheerleader Jie Ralls, now a Boston resident, to write a weekly diary.

''The idea of being a cheerleader is probably so foreign in China," says Ralls, 28, that even her relatives there don't really understand what she does as part of an NFL cheerleading squad. ''Hopefully this journal will give people an inside scoop of being a part of the Patriots organization."

Visit Tian He's blog at www.patriots.com/chinese. Visit the Chinese Patriots site at chinese.patriots.com.