Don’t get Ariel Helwani started on the New England Patriots.
“I hate the jersey, I hate the logo, I hate everything it represents,” said Helwani, a sports commentator well known for his coverage of combat sports, and a diehard fan of the Buffalo Bills, the Patriots’ divisional rival.
“I hate the history,” he said. “I hate the pain that they’ve caused us.”
What Helwani loved in recent years, then, were signs that the Patriots’ two-decade run as the NFL’s ultimate dynasty — including six Super Bowl titles under coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady, and known for controversial calls and league penalties for rules violations — seemed kaput.
Brady left in 2020. The Patriots haven’t been in the playoffs since Jan. 15, 2022, when the Bills — who had lost 15 consecutive times to Belichick’s Patriots over one eight-year stretch — routed New England by 30, a victory Helwani described cathartically as “one of the happiest nights in my life.”
Entering this season, a role reversal had taken place. The Patriots hadn’t produced a winning season since 2021. On their second coach in as many years since forcing Belichick out in 2024, they were no longer holding the AFC East under their thumb. The Bills, meanwhile, had become Super Bowl contenders with an MVP quarterback in Josh Allen.
Yet, on Oct. 5, New England stunningly snapped the Bills’ 14-game home winning streak. The Patriots haven’t lost since, building a six-game winning streak that has delivered a 7-2 record that ties for the NFL’s best and has put the franchise’s rebuild under second-year quarterback Drake Maye and coach Mike Vrabel ahead of schedule.
“I definitely wasn’t counting on them being this good this soon and it’s very annoying,” Helwani said. “I was enjoying seeing them struggle. I was enjoying seeing them drown a little bit. I was enjoying seeing them have losing seasons and being a little bit dysfunctional. It was all very nice and I was hoping for a few more years of it.”
Amid an NFL season in which no team has been particularly dominant, and even the expected title contenders have been fallible, what exactly New England’s strong start portends remains unclear. But for fans who love the Patriots and rivals who have loathed them, the possibility of the the franchise being good again this soon wasn’t among their 2025 expectations.
Barry Inciong first felt a change during New England’s unexpected October win at Buffalo. Soon after, interest surged in the gameday meet-ups he organizes between Patriots fans in Orange County, California, and at road games.
It suddenly felt like the clock had been turned back a decade.
“Now, we’re cheering against the Colts and Broncos for the (AFC) one seed,” he said.
The possibility of New England being truly good wasn’t on the radar for Brendan Cashman, a 48-year-old Patriots fan from suburban Boston. When his brothers discussed football last summer, it was often around the University of North Carolina’s upcoming season — not because any of them attended the school, but as a show of support for Belichick in his first season coaching in college.
“We don’t talk about that at all anymore,” Cashman said, because as soon as the Tar Heels flopped under Belichick, the family’s beloved NFL team was off to its best start since 2019, the last Patriots’ Super Bowl season.
New England's leadership in recent seasons had been a disaster, Cashman said. His hopes for 2024, Maye’s rookie year, were so low that he mostly hoped the quarterback wouldn’t develop bad habits or get get seriously injured behind a threadbare offensive line.
This season, despite still being one of the most-sacked quarterbacks in the league, Maye has completed 32 passes of 20 yards or more, tied for second-most in the league. He has joined former MVPs Brady, Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers as the only quarterbacks in NFL history to record eight straight games in a single season with at least 200 passing yards and a passer rating of 100.
New England ranks in the top seven in both points scored and allowed, a placement among the league’s best teams also supported by EPA, a widely-used advanced statistic.
Seeing the team’s fortunes flip so quickly this fall had been “bizarre,” Cashman said. He called himself cautiously optimistic about the team’s future.
Maye “could be under siege and is still getting better throughout the course of the game,” Cashman said. “That is just so foreign for a 23-year-old quarterback. Even last week, getting sacked five times by Cleveland, and really not impacting his play at all — it just seems all kind of like too good to be true.”
Few quarterbacks in NFL history have inspired such devoted loyalty from their fan base as Brady, the star who dated actresses and models and was married to a supermodel. Yet, the 23-year-old Maye has been quickly embraced. His appearance at a Boston-area high school football game last month became local news. Social media posts by Maye’s wife — the two began dating when they were 12 — are flooded with adoring comments.
“Your husband is the reason I wake up every day,” said one.
Rob Devaney, a 45-year-old New York Giants fan, lived in suburban Boston throughout the Patriots’ dynasty, when “the arrogance of the Patriots fans during the height of the Belichick-Brady-Ernie Adams era could make it insufferable, at times,” he said. (Inciong agreed all that winning had made Patriots fans “somewhat spoiled, somewhat entitled.”)
Since their last title in 2019, however, the specter of the Patriots being a step ahead of the rest of the league had diminished. From whiffing on free-agency and draft decisions to questionable coaching moves, they resembled any other team.
Under a new coaching staff led by Vrabel, a former Belichick player, the Patriots have proven their competence again. But “nobody’s hitting the panic button just yet,” Devaney said.
“I don’t think the non-Patriot fan up here is worried about a new dynasty being born,” he said. “Maybe if you were a Jets fan or a Bills fan up here, I think, they’re the ones who were scarred. And I think those fans, especially Bills fans, they may be saying, ‘Oh, come on.’“
Inciong’s interactions with other fans led him to believe that the “level of hate” for the new Patriots isn’t nearly to the level of the Belichick and Brady era. (One of Belichick's own players once referred to the coach, and his emotionless demeanor, as "Darth Vader.") Maye was too likeable, the team still a bit too unthreatening, Inciong said.
Not for Helwani, though.
“They can’t stay bad for a very long time and that’s a credit to their organization,” he said. “But, yeah, this wasn’t in my plans. I thought we’d cakewalk through the AFC East. Dolphins suck, Jets suck, Patriots suck, we’d wrap it up by Week 10. And obviously that wasn’t the case. And when they beat us at home a couple weeks ago I was so mad. I was as mad as I was if it was like a January loss because I despise those guys, I hate them. They cause me so much pain.”
