There used to be a simple rule: Anybody but the New England Patriots.
From 2001 through 2019, the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick dynasty totaled six Super Bowl titles, 13 conference championship appearances and 17 divisional crowns. They were the Evil Empire, constant contenders in a league designed for parity. It didn’t matter who you were; the Patriots were the final boss.
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The early years of the Patriots’ dynasty had a different feel. They were the Patriots, a dash of Americana, playing in red, white and blue, who won their first title as scrappy underdogs, lifting the Lombardi after a national tragedy. They had the head coaching guru in the hoodie and discovered the All-American quarterback in the sixth round of the draft. It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when Brady, Belichick and the Patriots were underdogs. They were, whisper it, even admired and beloved.
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But winning has a way of hardening opinions. And the Patriots committed the cardinal sports sin: they won too much. And they won differently. They were better, smarter, colder. And when other teams attempted to import the wisdom, it ended in disaster. Fans of other teams were sick of their success. Opponents, too.
Sure, there were other reasons. There were the cheating scandals: real and serious, and stupid and imagined. There were the off-field scandals. The arrogance. The whiff of Maga. The jockeying for credit. There was Portnoy. But the Patriots’ chief crime was that they won. For 20 years, they made 31 other fanbases miserable, building a generation of resentment. It made the downfall all the sweeter.
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Dynasties don’t explode. They erode. First, Brady left. The aura followed. Then the wins.
Without Brady, Belichick and the Patriots suffered. Then Belichick left. His replacement was fired after a season. Even in New England, the nostalgia faded away. Suddenly, Foxborough wasn’t hosting coronations. It was hosting fourth quarters where half the crowd had already beaten the traffic. The Evil Empire had become … normal.
But normal, it turns out, is humanizing.
And now the Patriots are back in the dance. On Sunday, they will be trying for their seventh title, which would break a tie with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the most Super Bowl wins by a franchise. They will face the Seahawks as underdogs. And the last time the Patriots were underdogs in a Super Bowl was 24 years ago, back when they were the fun upstarts, with the golden boy at quarterback taking on the Greatest Show on Turf. The prevailing sense now is not dread, but: good for them.
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It’s funny how a single force can have a halo effect on a franchise. In New England, that force is Mike Vrabel.
If the old Patriots were sterile, Vrabel’s version feels like a bar fight.
Vrabel is almost a caricature of a football coach. He’s the former Patriots linebacker who dives into brawls during team practice. The coach who bloodies his nose while teaching players proper technique. He’s the master strategist with a rah-rah spirit; the man who preaches situational football while ripping on a vape pen. He’s the secret dork who can recite the details of the rulebook while drinking his offensive linemen under the table.
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“You changed my life, coach,” Cory Durden, a Pats defensive end, said to Vrabel on the sideline after last month’s AFC championship game.
Durden isn’t the only one to think that way. Players – current and former – talk about Vrabel with a level of reverence. He’s one of their own. Vrabel spent 14 years in the league as a player, helping to kickstart the Patriots’ dynasty on the field before returning to the team as a coach. Win on Sunday, and he will become the first person to win a Super Bowl as a player and coach for the same franchise.
But for all the bombast, Vrabel is a brilliant football mind. He combs the rulebook for any advantage. He has built his coaching career on mastering “situational football,” breaking the game down to its component parts. As a player, he was a thumper. As a coach, he’s a tactician.
In Tennessee, Vrabel rebooted a flagging franchise, leading the Titans to the playoffs three times in six years. In New England, he has overseen a similar turnaround, from four wins a season ago to 14 wins and a Super Bowl berth this year. And his fingerprints are all over the rebuild. Along with coaching, he has the final say on personnel. He’s nailed draft picks, built a quality coaching staff and imported a free-agent class filled with guys from his Tennessee days. Anchoring the roster around a solid defense and quarterback Drake Maye, he turned the Patriots from doormat to contenders in one offseason.
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Vrabel is, in his own sense, an underdog; on a short list of players who have played and coached at the highest level. Chucked out by the Titans after a power struggle, he spent a year in the wilderness, helping out in Cleveland after missing out on head coaching gigs in the 2024 cycle. At 6ft 4in and around 250lbs, he was too big and too intimidating for modern executives, according to The Athletic. That didn’t matter to the Patriots.
The team is now built in his image. They’re talented, obviously, piloted by Maye, an MVP-caliber quarterback, even if he has struggled so far this postseason. But they’re also scrappy, a who’s who of cast-offs and grinders. The dark lore that shrouded the mid-to-late period of the Belichick-Brady partnership has been left behind. These Patriots don’t beat you 38–10. They beat you 20–17 and make you hate every second of it. There’s something oddly charming about that.
And yet, as always, some elements break the happy, scrappy narrative.
This is still a team owned and operated by Robert Kraft, a man so utterly dedicated to securing his place in the game’s history that he produced a 10-part documentary to burnish his own reputation – while knifing the greatest coach of the modern era in the back. Kraft has been so relentlessly obsessed with a place in the Hall of Fame that it has turned voters off.
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Then there’s Kraft’s off-field activities. There was the massage parlor. There is his cosy relationship with the Trump administration. Kraft and Trump are long-term friends. Kraft claimed to cut communication with the President after the storming of the Capitol in 2021, but sat next to Trump at the premiere of Melania last week. The public showing came after Kraft had lobbied the administration to give his buddy favorable treatment during a crackdown on law firms. It is also surely a coincidence that the friendship restarted after Kraft’s son, Josh Kraft, dropped out of the Boston mayoral race. Kraft, it seems, is happy to help drive a nation over the cliff if he can pick up some hardware and huzzahs on the way.
It would be easy to ignore Kraft’s involvement if it were not standard practice for the NFL to present the trophy to the winning owner before anyone else.
The Patriots also have two players under investigation for allegations of violence against women. Defensive tackle Christian Barmore is facing domestic violence charges, accused of assaulting his daughter’s mother, who is pregnant with his second child, according to a criminal complaint. Stefon Diggs, a wide receiver, is facing strangulation and assault charges from a woman who worked as his private chef.
Barmore and Diggs, who both deny the allegations against them, are key contributors to the team. If Barmore grabs a game-clinching sack or Diggs hauls in a crucial catch, will NBC even mention the accusations? If Kraft holds the trophy, will the broadcast do anything but genuflect to Mr Kraft? Don’t hold your breath.
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Vrabel’s halo is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But he has been able to wind back the clock to the pre-dynasty days. The Patriots have a lovable coach again and a young star at quarterback, one whose wife bakes pregame cookies. They play as a team. They’ve turned underheralded players into potential champions. They are good and fun and young and even cool again. On the field, they are mostly likable.
It only took two decades, six banners, a collapse and an identity transplant. But Vrabel has made most of the team human again. And the funny thing about humans? We tend to root for them.
