Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2024 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: The New, Fresh, Expansion-Style NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS.
Your 2023 record: 4-13, and that was the fun part. An entire year of speculation about the time, place, and future of William Stephen Belichick was the actual record of this team, and the wins and losses stopped mattering by Week 6. There is no numeric value for Watching The King Die save the number of days it takes him to reach room temperature, and if you start from the opening loss to the Eagles to the day he got his dead fish in the mail, it took 123 days. It's a wonder that Bob Kraft waited five days after the final loss to the Jets since he'd been waiting since the day Tom Brady left to wreak his revenge.
The offense was relentlessly hideous in such a varied number of avenues that schadenfreude gave way to ennui well before Halloween. Mac Jones played his way to Jacksonville in 11 easy steps, only one of which (a Week 7 win over the Bills) was a tolerable viewing experience, but when you have only two running backs who carried the ball more than 16 times and your best receiver finished 78th in yards gained, just ahead of retired tight end Darren Waller, you're bound to have some threadbare days. The Patriots won only one game at home all season, and Comrade Magary's favorite fan base became almost too sullen and morose to properly pronounce the word "fack."
The waiting on Belichick to get tagged and bagged would have become unbearable for the villagers and their woodland creatures if not for the fact that New England had the Celtics and Bruins to distract them. Belichick stayed too long at the fair and took the team with him. His firing, and no matter what they called it it was very definitely a firing, had all the surprise of Joe Biden's retirement and none of the dignity. Belichick had résumés out almost immediately, if you call "Bill Belichick's on Line One and says he's available whenever you want to fly him out" a résumé. The surprise, though, came when it turned out nobody much wanted him, precisely because he was Bill Belichick. He was either too old, too crusty, too set in his ways, or not Raheem Morris enough. That thought alone made Comrade Magary sing, "I Am Sixteen Going On Seventeen" at karaoke night in Satan's Workshop Tavern, and he still wears that red gingham dress to this day.
Belichick eventually took the network gig you knew he'd take because it's one of the few things people think he'll beat Tom Brady at, and he will because like any good coach, he can act, even charm. That does not mean that he wouldn't take the next coaching job that will have him. Well-known wind source Colin Cowherd already says he's hearing Buffalo, Dallas, or Philadelphia as his next coaching stop, which has the same binding properties as you being named the Princess of Sussex, the White Witch of Narnia, or Drew Carey's valet. In other words, he has to become less him to get a gig now, and after so many years of being an excellent him it seems unlikely he can or would be anything else.
This means not only that you no longer have Belichick as your hate language, you also lose access to his cavalcade of annoyances—Matt Patricia, Joe Judge, Josh McDaniels, and all the other big stride/little shoes assistants who basked in his glory and shrank when they tried to take it with them.
Your coach: It's Bob Kraft rolling the dice with Jerod Mayo, the next incarnation of much-praised Houston success story DeMeco Ryans, in that he is a defensive thinker who doesn't scare his players' children when Dad tells them a bedtime story about the boss. Mayo's résumé is five years coaching the linebackers under Belichick, so we'll find out soon enough how much not like Belichick he intends to be.
What he stands for is defense. What he doesn't stand for is Mac Jones, now clipboarding for Trevor Lawrence as a job more fitting his skill set—although people are starting to wonder if that's actually Lawrence's skill set as well because he hasn't turned into Patrick Mahomes yet. Beyond that, Mayo is very much an open book, because while he is being encouraged to be his own man, he comes from a background that permits no such tomfoolery. How can someone be the fruit of the Belichick tree and not taste like a Miralax/pickle juice smoothie?
Your quarterback: It's Bailey Zappe ... no, they just signed Jacoby Brissett ... no wait, they drafted Drake Maye. You'll see them all, at least two of them will disappoint you, and it'll be all three if you haven't stopped hating the Patriots for how they ruined the start of your 2019. Maye has been hyped almost as much as Caleb Williams and J.J. McCarthy, but he has the disadvantage of playing in the ACC and being only the first in a series of transitional quarterbacks in Foxborough. Coaches who follow great coaches tend to be diminished by the temperature of the shadow, but it takes three or four quarterbacks following a great quarterback to make you feel good about forgetting the old quarterback. And yes, we are not including Jordan Love as an exception that proves the rule quite yet.
What’s new that sucks: The team's NFLPA grade, which dropped from a prehistoric 24th in 2023 to 29th, which means that they must have honored Belichick in his final season by removing the water heaters and making the players' parking lot pay-by-the-hour. If Mayo has any clout, that number will rise next year to something more commodious, like mud huts in snowbanks, but if he wants to win the locker room for being more than Not Him, sprucing up the fringe benefits for the departing dozens of Belichick's old horses isn't the worst idea he'll have.
What has always sucked: The whole Kraft thing. Belichick might have granted everyone else the power to be smug in victory, but Kraft doubled down on it when he canned the out-of-fashion old bastard, as though he was dismantling a monument to evil that he hadn't been coasting behind for two decades. He waited until the dry rot set in, gave Mayo the job of replacing the siding, and if he doesn't do it well enough and fast enough to leave the kids a shiny new football palace, well, you know. An octogenarian owner who only gets to fire one guy every quarter-century is likely to enjoy his first taste of someone else's blood and want to do it again, and Kraft just dedicated this at the Patriots training facility the players so hate:
Jesus. He wants it bad, doesn't he?
What might not suck: Comrade Magary wrote in this very space last year, "You will still sweep the Jets this season. It’s a lock." The Jets won on the last day of the season 17-3, giving those hopeless dolts a reason to believe in the kindness of 2024 that is utterly unwarranted by the facts. You see, when rooting for your team is a hopeless task, rooting against someone else's is almost as good.
HEAR IT FROM PATRIOTS FANS!
Allison:
I was raised in Greater Boston and spent my entire childhood idolizing the Patriots. Only when I went to Virginia for grad school in 2015 did I fully start understanding why the team was so loathed.
I went home to Massachusetts for Christmas in 2019, only to fly back to my home Virginia for New Years. As I got off the plane from a very early flight, I got into a rideshare for the forty minute drive across the bridge to my home. The driver then asks me how I'm doing and where I'm coming from. I tell him I was visiting my family in Boston for Christmas. He then immediately chimes in, "oh, I love Boston sports!"
And as he spends the rest of the ride telling me how the Black players don't appreciate how much they're paid, and how Eli Manning should be sent to prison for what he did to our team, I realized, "You know, when he asked where I was from, it would have been really easy to lie."
Chas:
That twenty year blip on the radar of being the best team in sports was cool. Now we get to watch Tom Brady’s face slowly melt and Belichick shake his dick at barely legal girls. Anyway, I hope they stop drafting first round QB bags of dogshit soon and go back to cheating.
Jack:
A Patriots fan was beaten to death by a pair of fellow Patriots fans at the Dolphins game in Gillette and that still wasn't even the most embarrassing part of the season.
Casey:
I need to write in and talk about how fucking braindead some of my fellow Pats fans are. As soon as Jerod Mayo was announced as head coach, the chowderheads immediately started calling him a “DEI hire” for pretty mildly acknowledging locker room diversity. Pretty rich coming from all the Sullys who have only been employed by their parents.
I hope Drake Maye pans out, this poor region hasn’t seen a team win a championship since June!
Darrin:
The biggest off-season battle was between two men with a combined age of 155 dating women with a combined age of 55.
Whoever scouts WRs for the Patriots has to be placing bets against us. It's the only explanation.
Andy:
We're free. We're free. We're free. New Englanders no longer have to watch Mac Jones miss open receivers by 15 yards (or fail to see them altogether). We no longer have to pretend he'll get better with more experience. We no longer have to endure the word "Macpilled." And with Belichick gone, we can finally stop stressing about having to root for an unrepentant asshole to break the record held by Don Shula, an even more unrepentant asshole. We can finally settle into being Just Another NFL Team, albeit with Kraft's various demons and general sliminess. We're on the road to 9 and...8 (I still can't do 17-game math). We're going back to the hazy days of the late-90s when Pete Carroll was trying to chew his way to a playoff win and we had adorable beloved "stars" like Ben Coates.
We don't have the best quarterback in the world. We don't have the best coach in history. We don't have any skill players that you're really going to get excited about. We don't have any pop stars dating any of our players. But it's fine, because we're free.
Are we obnoxious? Absolutely. Do I care? No I do not. Every NFL fandom is obnoxious. We're not trying to put the wilting, patchouli-smelling husk of Aaron Rodgers over on you, and we're not trying to fight you about Josh Allen being the next Brady even though he hasn't actually won anything yet, and we're not still insisting on Tua being able to play quarterback despite no longer being reliably able to count to five without getting dizzy, so you can shove your judgment up your ass.
(I'm going to reread this in December, when Cris Collinsworth has compared Drake Maye (unfavorably) to Tom Brady for the 875th time and my left Bean Boot sits lodged in my TV screen.)
Steve:
I blew a solid amount of money last preseason on good seats to a late December Pats-Chiefs Monday Night Football game. It got flexed to Sunday afternoon, which I didn't even know the league could do, and my only memory of the whole thing is my wife getting very quiet and distant after the fans booed Jumbotron Taylor Swift.
This season they've been relegated to one primetime game, and that's if a Week 3 Thursday nighter against the Jets really counts as such.
We deserve your total apathy and nothing more.
Fuck Bob Kraft with Tom Brady's seventh Lombardi.
Patrick:
When the Patriots hired Jerod Mayo, the Instagram comments on every post about it were filled with Pats fans saying they should have hired Mike Vrabel, who went 6-11 last year and has a 2-3 record in the playoffs. I wonder why.
Jeremy:
In Javon Baker’s FaceTime interview with Steve Smith, while answering a question about his propensity for dropped passes, he dropped his phone.
Brady told Jeff Ross that the Orchids of Asia incident was out of bounds but apparently any and all jokes about the mothers of his children were fair game.
Drake Maye’s throwing motion is as smooth as 100-grit sandpaper. I’m sure QB whisperer Joe Judge can fix him, along with our mid-50s offensive coordinator who has never called plays and was fired the last time he held the OC title in the AFC East.
Elliot Wolf and Matt Groh are nepotism babies who were involved in all of the disastrous draft picks and FA signings from Tyquan Thornton onwards. To fill our glaring LT need we drafted a RT who played zero college LT snaps, and we've played him exclusively at RT to date. We also signed a FA tackle who has never played a down of LT in his NFL career to be our projected starter.
When talking about why Calvin Ridley didn’t sign with us, Kraft talked about Calvin’s wife, the Northeast, and taxes...everything but the paltry deal size of our offer. For context, we led the league in cap space and still have $44M just sitting there as I write this.
Highlight of the season was a week 7 win over the Bills that cost us Jayden Daniels. At least 2019-2023 Belichick can’t hurt us anymore. Go Celtics.
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