New England Patriots

The New England Patriots are the franchise that broke professional football and then had to figure out what to do after the spell wore off. For twenty years — from 2001 to 2020 — the Patriots were not just the best team in the NFL. They were the best team in the history of the NFL, a dynasty so dominant and so sustained that it warped the entire sport around itself. Six Super Bowl championships, nine Super Bowl appearances, seventeen division titles, and a run of success so improbable that people spent two decades trying to prove it wasn't real. Spygate, Deflategate, every conspiracy theory and accusation — none of it changed the fundamental, undeniable truth: the Patriots, under Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, were the most successful partnership in the history of American professional sports.

Before Brady and Belichick, the Patriots were one of the NFL's more forgettable franchises. Founded in 1960 as the Boston Patriots, a charter member of the AFL, they spent their early decades as lovable underdogs at best and irrelevant at worst. They played in a series of inadequate stadiums — Fenway Park, Harvard Stadium, Boston College's Alumni Stadium — and didn't reach the Super Bowl until 1986, when they were demolished by the Chicago Bears. The franchise's pre-Brady history was characterized by occasional competence, frequent dysfunction, and a perpetual sense of playing second fiddle to the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins in New England's crowded sports landscape. The arrival of Robert Kraft as owner in 1994 stabilized the franchise, but nobody could have predicted what was coming.

What was coming was the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft: a skinny quarterback from Michigan named Tom Brady, who sat on the bench for a year, replaced an injured Drew Bledsoe in 2001, and proceeded to win the Super Bowl. That first championship — the upset of the heavily favored St. Louis Rams — was supposed to be a fairy tale, a one-time event. Instead, it was the opening chapter of the most extraordinary run in sports history. Brady and Belichick won three of their first four Super Bowls, endured a decade of near-misses that would have defined any other franchise's entire history, and then won three more. The 28-3 comeback against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI was not just the greatest Super Bowl ever played — it was the moment that confirmed the Patriots had transcended the normal boundaries of competition.

And then it ended. Brady left for Tampa Bay in 2020 and won a Super Bowl without Belichick. Belichick stayed and couldn't win without Brady. The divorce was slow and awkward, and by the time Belichick departed after the 2023 season, the Patriots had become what they hadn't been in a generation: bad. But the rebuild proved faster than anyone expected. Drake Maye, selected in the first round of the 2024 draft, emerged as the franchise's new cornerstone, and in his second season led the Patriots on an improbable run all the way to Super Bowl LX. The loss to the Seattle Seahawks, 31-21, stung — but it also announced to the league that New England was back. The Kraft family's infrastructure, the organizational culture, and Maye's fearless quarterbacking have given Foxborough genuine reason for optimism. The banners from the dynasty still hang in the rafters. The memories are indelible. And the work of building something new is no longer just beginning — it's producing results.