When news broke earlier this week that Bill Belichick did not get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on his first shot, the sports world reacted with shock and outrage.
I wasn’t surprised. People really, really, really hate the Patriots. As a Massachusetts kid who has lived in the New York City area since 2009, I know that as well as anyone. My Giants-fan and Jets-fan friends virulently hate the Pats; so do nearly all NFL fans who aren’t from New England, right?
Patriots hate runs deep. Admittedly, there are a lot of data points in that stew: Spygate (legitimate); Deflategate (fake); Aaron Hernandez; Malcolm Butler’s end-zone interception; Julian Edelman’s bobble catch; 28-3; Dave Portnoy; Antonio Brown; Alex Guerrero and the TB12 Method; Belichick’s accidental Brian Flores text; Bob Kraft at the massage parlor; Brady’s MAGA hat; plus, sheer exhaustion from all the winning.
Belichick and the Patriots were like Darth Vader and the Empire in Star Wars. I get it. It’s how I feel about the Yankees.
Success Breeds Enemies
When I was a cub reporter at Fortune in 2010, a senior features writer was writing a big profile of Kraft, and I worked on the charts for the story. One of them demonstrated Kraft’s dominance over his fellow owners by comparing his average wins per season since 1994, when he bought the team, to all of the other owners in that time period. Kraft, with 10.38 wins, edged out Broncos owner Pat Bowlen’s 9.56, Jeffrey Lurie’s Eagles with 9, and Jerry Jones’s Cowboys with 8.75. And Kraft steamrolled them all in Super Bowl appearances (5) and rings (3).
And that was more than 15 years ago. Since then, Kraft and the Patriots have been to five more Super Bowls and won two of them, with a third on the line Sunday.
How about the Patriots as a business off the field? Forbes pegs them as the No. 4 most valuable NFL franchise worth $9 billion (I’d argue for higher, but the stadium is 24 years old and it’s out in Foxborough). The team would surely sell for substantially more than that, since almost every franchise in the past 10 years has sold for well above its media valuation, and Kraft sold an 8% stake to private equity in September at a more than $9 billion valuation already.
You can’t escape Patriots dynasty alums on sports TV and radio. Brady is unavoidable as the lead Fox NFL color commentator, and he has already gone from maligned to garlanded by sports media critics. Randy Moss, Tedy Bruschi, Damien Woody, and Jason McCourty are mainstays on ESPN; Devin McCourty and Rodney Harrison are on NBC; Logan Ryan is on CBS; Gronk is on Fox. Brian Hoyer and David Andrews have a podcast; Rob Ninkovich has a podcast. They all won rings and learned Belichick’s brutalist media discipline.
The Chiefs are about where the Patriots were at the end of the first half of the Brady dynasty. Five Super Bowl appearances in six years, three wins. But somehow the Kansas City dynasty has never needled people in the same way. Andy Reid smiling in State Farm ads doesn’t foment the level of distaste Belichick and Brady’s relentless machine did.
Harder to Hate
Now it’s a new Patriots era. They haven’t been to the Super Bowl in seven years. And dare I say, they’re a lot more likable this time.
Brady and Belichick are gone. Can you really gather the same level of hate for plucky Drake Maye, married to his childhood sweetheart who’s gone viral for her baking, and locker-room motivator Mike Vrabel?
In fact, these Patriots are underdogs. It feels like where the Patriots were in 2001, when the 199th draft pick, Tom Brady, subbed in for Drew Bledsoe and never looked back, and still-new owner Bob Kraft had taken a chance on Bill Belichick, a loser from the Browns. The most annoying thing about these Patriots is the “Drake “Drake Maye” Maye” jokes.
And that means these Patriots could still do a heel turn and become the Empire again.
