Pats Pulpit
There isn’t a Patriots game this week for the first time since late August, so I imagine that a lot of you out there will either be taking this Sunday off from the NFL or tuning into the RedZone Channel, losing the remote between the couch cushions, and spending the day rooting against the various teams competing with New England for a postseason spot while praying to the fantasy gods that you can sneak into one of those last few open playoff slots. And so I thought now would be a good time to send everyone a gentle reminder regarding the 2025 Patriots.
This entire season is already a massive, massive win.
I’m sure that there are a few folks out there who saw 11-2 through 14 weeks coming, but the vast majority of us (yours truly included) came into this season hoping for 10-7, a Wild Card berth, and perhaps they get a playoff win on the road before getting sent home by the Chiefs or Bills or Ravens or Bengals or whoever they had to play in the Divisional Round. I would have taken that result and basked in it all offseason long, optimistic and hopeful that they’d be able to build on that 9-8 season to maybe sneak into the conversation of legit contenders for 2026. As long as Drake Maye took some steps forward, I got a solid sense of who the long-term contributors were, and Mike Vrabel showed the level of poise and competence he showed during his early tenure with Tennessee, I would have been made in the shade.
But here I am, in December, looking at my team currently listed as the One Seed in the AFC. They’re a flawed team in a conference full of flawed teams, and they have as good a chance as anybody to go on a run. They are all but guaranteed to make the playoffs at this point, and may very well be hosting at least one postseason game at Gillette. This time last year, heading into this very same bye, the Patriots had just been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs on the heels of a 25-24 loss to the Anthony Richardson-led Colts at home to drop them to 3-10. That kind of turnaround simply doesn’t happen, and yet here we are.
I’ll say it again: this entire season, no matter what happens from here on out, is a massive win. Even if they lose the next four games and go one-and-done in the playoffs, or even somehow miss the playoffs entirely at 11-6, I’m still standing by that statement. This team has already exceeded expectations, and all that a complete implosion and doomsday scenario would hammer home is how it took some kind of unprecedented and inexplicable collapse for the Patriots to fall down to what most people had pegged as the highest possible ceiling for the team this year. There’s nowhere to go but up, and I’m enjoying every second of it.
I would never...
