Patriots Fans are FREAKING OUT and the 2025 Seahawks Weren't THAT Good.

Patriots fans are FREAKING OUT about their team getting EXPOSED by the Seahawks in Super Bowl LX!

That’s right: the NFL’s most notorious schedule merchants filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week. The Seahawks’ bunco squad just busted them for six months’ worth of fraud.

New England Patriots Offseason Preview

Just a few weeks ago, legions of Patriots fans who emerged from three years of dormancy like cicadas were buzzing about the return of their Forever Dynasty for another two-decade hitch. Now, those same fans are freebasing copium and touchily defending their team’s accomplishments – Drake Maye was the mostest deservingest MVP runner-up EVER! – while getting wobbly-kneed at the sight of next year’s s-s-schedule.

Oh, that’s wicked hahhd, Seamus. We gotta face the Jaguars. You know, the perennial doormat who got hot against the Titans and Jets in the second half of the year, and then lost in the first round of the playoffs? Oh, and the Chahhhgers: look out for those middleweights if their offensive line is healthy. Hey, I’m not saying that we benefitted from a soft schedule this year or anything. But … maybe we buy Celtics season tickets instead this year?

Yep, Patriots fans have gone from prancing around like Marky Mark after jets blowouts to vanishing like Marky Mark the moment things appear to be going sideways. They know their team will never recover from that Super Bowl debacle in which Will Campbell’s arms got shorter, Stefon Diggs got even hornier, Josh McDaniels got stupider and Drake Maye Freaky-Friday’ed with Sam Darnold. These weren’t the 2001 Patriots, Seamus. They were the 1985 Patriots, destined to recede into the dustbin of history for another decade.

I thought long and hard during the week about whether to take a respectful, sober, analytical approach to this extended Patriots Offseason Preview or go full King of the Trolls. Surely, many of the soft schedule/short arms/Maye-is-overrated shots that were fired at the Patriots over the past week were freezer-burned priors that sat under the heat lamp for months. If you spent the second half of the season and the playoffs betting on the “schedule merchants” to succumb to superior foes, you lost a lot of money.

As for the “Patriots will regress to the mean” conversation making the rounds, regression to the mean is the safest wager in the world, because you are betting on both the rest of the NFL and probability itself. If the Patriots do anything except return to the Super Bowl, you get to be a genius. When the bookies start taking action on win totals, the Patriots will be at around 10.5, and the moneyline for the Under will be around -140. Regression is baked into the odds like flour and butter. The take is a lot steamier than the wager.

Oh, but the trolling is so much fun! Fun! FUN!

Patriots fans have been insecure about the schedule for months. They knew their team was feasting on cream donuts. If they were Eagles fans, they would have been more skeptical than even the national media, perhaps demanding that Vrabel be fired for only beating the Burrow/Chase-less Bengals by only six points. But Patriots fans don’t constantly inoculate themselves against disappointment, because they never had to. They are also prone to magical thinking. The sillier the Patriots’ path to the Super Bowl became – snowstorms, Jarrett Stidham, more snowstorms – the more likely their fans were to interpret it all as divine favor.

And now many of those Patriots fans are disillusioned to the soul and worried about the future, and rubbing their faces in it is fun! Fun! FUN!

Ah, but while trolling scratches an itch on the fetid underside of my soul, it makes for off-putting content and poor analysis.

Campbell is probably not some toothpick-armed guard cosplaying at left tackle. Maye has a few flavor-of-the-year attributes, but if he’s any sort of “fraud,” what on earth does that make Justin Herbert or C.J. Stroud? The schedule was historically easy, but the Bills lost to several common opponents (Dolphins, Falcons, Texans with Davis Mills at quarterback): the path may have been straight and wide, but it still takes talent, discipline, perseverance and focus not to steer straight into a ditch.

The 2025 Patriots’ easy schedule did not “cause” anything. It did, however, impact everything: stats, trends, tendencies, tactics, perceptions, results. That’s a key distinction to make when trying to predict what the Patriots do next.