Using concepts developed over the years by de Gennes, Doi, Edwards, Marrucci, Rubinstein, McLeish, Milner, and others, a kind of standard model for entangled polymer relaxation and rheology has been developed, which, like the standard model of high-energy physics, has a number of ad hoc assumptions and fitting parameters. The “standard model” of polymer relaxation is based on a phenomenological tube surrounding each polymer chain that represents the effect on that chain of non-crossability constraints imposed by surrounding chains.