I hope everyone got outside and did something fun this weekend. For some reason I’ll never know or understand, we’ve all seen the sun out past 4:30 p.m. ET for the last time this year. The extra hour of sleep and the extra hour of staying out at the bars used to be nice – few things ring sweeter to a 22-year-old’s ear’s than that time travel last call where the drinks are 1985 prices for that additional hour of boozing – but now that I’m an old man who wakes up early regardless and hasn’t heard a bartender yell for last call in almost a decade, there’s just nothing positive that comes out of 4 p.m. sunsets and perpetual darkness for the next six months.
On the plus side, the New England Patriots just won their fifth straight game, taking the Cleveland Browns behind the woodshed to the tune of a 32-13 beatdown that wasn’t even that close. It definitely wasn’t perfect, but this team just keeps getting better every week, and the rest of the league seems to just get worse. Hard not to be excited for the second half of the season.
- And that’s what I want to kick these Fan Notes off with: excitement. This is an exciting team. They’re fun to watch. There’s a level of enjoyment I’m experiencing watching the 2025 Patriots that I didn’t even get during the Tom Brady Era. While I wouldn’t trade the Tommy B years for anything in the world, it was simply impossible for those teams to overachieve. The expectations were so high for the Brady-led Patriots that even when they met them, the narrative was that they only won by one score or the defense is a disaster or Brady lost his deep ball or whatever it was. You never looked beyond each individual season with those teams because every year the only options were win a Super Bowl or suffer epic embarrassment and failure.
- But in the 2025 squad, we have a young, talented group of kids who are exceeding expectations. They’re gelling as a unit. They have highly skilled players at all the important positions. They’ve already won for the year in a lot of ways and are trending strongly upwards. They have a ton of cap space going into next season, and if things keep going the way they’re going, this unit could become championship caliber. I still don’t think they’re quite there yet, but they’re for sure in the neighborhood and asking questions.
- And what’s more, they’re fun to watch. The playcalling is exciting. They can attack all three levels of the field in the passing game and are capable of explosive plays on the ground. The defense hasn’t allowed a single running back to eclipse 50 yards on the ground and players are stepping up at every level. I’ve been very vocal about how over the last few years, Sundays at 1 PM were a real slog. But I...
Pats Pulpit
