The twilight of the Patriots’ dynasty has finally arrived
For almost two decades, the Patriots have torched opponents and fired up New England’s sports fans. Now the clock is ticking down.
History tells us that dynasties end. They don’t have to end with heads in a basket, like the Stuarts in Great Britain or the Bourbons in France. When Queen Victoria died, Britain’s current House of Windsor took over from her House of Hanover with little more than some messy business around their German royal titles (it was, after all, World War I). The last emperor of China even had a rather vibrant life after royalty. But no matter how things end, the longer a dynasty lasts, the more fragile it becomes.
There’s something similar in sports. If a team has a sustained run of success — like the New England Patriots have had since the dawn of the 21st century — the best it can hope for at the end is a brief slide into mediocrity. The worst that can happen is a complete collapse. New Englanders know this. We got to revel, if only for a few years, when it finally happened to the New York Yankees in the mid-1960s. We suffered through it three times with the Boston Celtics, first after Bill Russell retired after winning NBA championship number 11 in 1969; the next year, the team fell to sixth place in its conference. The Dave Cowens-John Havlicek champions of the mid-1970s won their second championship in 1976; within two seasons, they were in 10th place, having won only 29 games. And their great dynasty in the 1980s, led by Larry Bird, slid inexorably toward the petrified forest of the 1990s that saw them win 15 games in 1997 and 19 games in 1999, a tailspin the franchise didn’t truly shake off until it won another championship in 2008.
All dynasties get fragile and then fall. The only question is how hard the landing is going to be.
We are seeing this fragility emerge now with the Patriots. The remarkable run that began in the 2001 season, when Tom Brady replaced Drew Bledsoe and Bill Belichick caught the beam he’s still riding, is probably not over, despite the unfortunate happenings in Minneapolis in February. I’d say, all things being equal, there is at least one more Super Bowl appearance in this crew, perhaps even two. The American Football Conference Eastern Division, in which the Patriots play, is still awful. Brady is still the best quarterback in football. And it’s unlikely that Bill Belichick will have a revelation and run off to join the Carthusians. Most of the team’s pieces are still in place, although if Rob Gronkowski goes off to be an action movie hero — and I will buy a ticket for his first film — that changes the dynamic a bit.
