Pats Pulpit
Everyone’s favorite offseason countdown returns!
It’s time for everyone’s favorite offseason countdown!
Well, kind of.
Anyone who has been following Pats Pulpit for a while knows that, since 2013, I have spent every offseason counting down the 20 Most Memorable New England Patriots Moments from the previous year. The key word was always “memorable,” as not all of them were good... but the vast, vast majority of them were. The idea was to encapsulate the entire Patriots season via 20 main moments, and it was always something I very much enjoyed doing.
Until, that is, last year.
The 2023 Patriots season was, as we all know, a complete disaster. The Mac Jones experiment turned out to be an abysmal failure, and a team with plenty of optimism coming into the league year limped to an embarrassing 3-14 season. Bill Belichick moved on, there were question marks at virtually every level, and the Patriots had fallen from the class of the NFL to one of its worst franchises. And because of that, there was just no way that I would be able to come up with 20 good moments. Hell, I was barely able to get myself to 10.
So I decided to conduct a little experiment of my own. Last year saw me deviating from my usual Top 20 countdown, opting instead to break it into two parts: the 10 Best Patriots Moments of 2023, and the 10 Worst. The highs were high, but the lows were lower, and my thought process was that we would all be able to laugh in order to keep from crying.
The results of that experiment were as follows:
I’m nothing if not receptive to feedback, so I’m more than happy to give the Top 10 Worst Patriots Moments countdown the Jerod Mayo treatment and let it go after one season.
That said, the 2024 Patriots were still a pretty bad team, and one more or less devoid of major highlights. There were a few in there for sure, but there’s simply no way I’d be able to come up with 20 great moments that comprise the previous year. Even if I allowed myself five bad moments to round things out, I still couldn’t come up with 15. The team was just too inconsistent.
So I present to you, over the coming weeks and months of the offseason, the Top 10 Patriots Moments of 2024.
We’re keeping things 100 percent positive this offseason. There is plenty of reason for optimism based on what we saw last year, and I see no reason to be the turd in the punchbowl by reminding us of all the unwonted stinkery we sat through...
