New England is, by most accounts, the greatest dynasty in NFL history and it has taken a place in the pantheon of greatest dynasties in all of sports. Are Brady, Belichick and the Pats done? That remains to be seen.
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — As Robert Kraft recalls, he was a very popular guy among his fellow NFL owners when he bought the New England Patriots in 1994. And it remained that way for a couple years.
“Everyone was so nice to me for those first few years,” Kraft said. “Once we went to the Super Bowl in ’96, a lot of the people that were very kind and gracious changed. I think everyone loves a doormat in this league.”
So what about now, five Super Bowl wins — perhaps going on six — later?
“You can imagine,” Kraft said. “But they’re all great to my face.”
Outside the NFL as well as inside, Kraft’s Patriots inspire intense emotions. They are the franchise that fans love or loathe. When they face the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in Minneapolis, they will be making their eighth Super Bowl appearance in 18 seasons since Kraft hired Bill Belichick as his coach and the team used a sixth-round draft choice on quarterback Tom Brady.
They are, by most accounts, the greatest dynasty in NFL history and they have taken a place in the pantheon of greatest dynasties in all of sports. Are they done? That remains to be seen. Belichick turns 66 in April. Brady turns 41 in August. There has been speculation about this being their final season together. But Kraft vows to do all that he can to hold things together for as long as he can. There are few signs of slippage in the professional prowess of Belichick and Brady. Their ruthless competitiveness appears unblunted.
“How easy is that for all of us to just take it easy?” former Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi said. “Winning four, that’s enough. Winning five, that’s enough. [But] it just doesn’t stop. It’s an addiction. Winning becomes an addiction.”
Brady was asked during this Super Bowl buildup about last year’s Super Bowl win over the Atlanta Falcons in Houston, in which the Patriots overcame a 28-3 deficit to prevail in overtime. Brady said he hadn’t thought about that game in quite a while.
“What’s happened in the past is great,” Brady said. “But that’s not going to win us anything this weekend.”
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The Cleveland Browns won three NFL championships and lost three other championship games in a six-year span in the 1950s. The Green Bay Packers won three of the final five NFL championships before the Super Bowl era and then won the first two Super Bowls. The Pittsburgh Steelers won four of six Super Bowls between the 1974 and ’79 seasons. The San Francisco 49ers won four of nine Super Bowls between the ’81 and ’89 seasons. The Dallas Cowboys won three of four Super Bowls between the ’92 and ’95 seasons.
The Patriots of Belichick and Brady could be about to win three Super Bowls in a four-year span — for the second time.
“You have to look at the longevity and put them first,” former NFL coach Tony Dungy said. ” … To stay from 2001 to 2017 at that level of excellence for 17 years is pretty amazing.”
Former NFL wide receiver Cris Collinsworth, who will be in NBC’s broadcast booth for Sunday’s game, said the nature of the league today, with free agency and the salary cap ruining teams’ continuity and promoting parity, makes the Patriots the greatest dynasty the sport has seen.
“The system is now built to not allow it to happen,” Collinsworth said. “It can’t happen — the draft, free agency, coaches changing spots. This league has manufactured a system to never allow the Patriots to win as much as they’ve won. And the fact that they’ve been able to somehow keep it together, hold it together and deliver the championships that they have, I don’t think we’ll ever see it again.”
The Patriots’ dynasty takes its place among others in professional and college sports.
Belichick’s former defensive coordinator in Cleveland, Nick Saban, has won five of the past nine college football national championships at Alabama.
In Major League Baseball, the New York Yankees have been a long-standing dynasty, with 27 World Series titles dating to 1923. Joe Torre managed them to four World Series triumphs in a five-year span between 1996 and 2000.
“My first spring training team meeting in ’96, I said, ‘Guys, I’ve never been to a World Series. All my coaches have. I don’t want to win one. I want to win three in a row,’ ” Torre said. “In saying that, I just wanted to let them know I didn’t want — you fight like hell to get there, and you win it, and you say, ‘All right, I did it.’ I think once you stop to admire, you stop doing it.”
Some success can beget more, according to Torre.
“I think that’s the big plus of having teams like New England,” he said. “When a player goes over there, they ask, ‘How can I help?’ I’m sure. It’s the attitude they seem to have. I know with us, we had big-time players like David Justice come over and say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ Having a team that has won a number of times allows you that luxury of, basically: You have to conform to us because what we do seems to work.”
Basketball seems to lend itself to dynasties. UCLA won 10 men’s collegiate national titles in 12 seasons, ending in 1975, with John Wooden as its coach. Geno Auriemma has coached the Connecticut women’s team to 10 national championships since 2000 and another in 1995.
The NBA has had a series of dynasties. The Red Auerbach-coached Boston Celtics won nine of 10 championships from the mid-1950s to mid-60s (followed by two more in three years with Bill Russell coaching). Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls won six titles in eight years in the ’90s. Phil Jackson coached those Bulls teams, then moved on to win five more championships within 11 years with the Los Angeles Lakers.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr said he regards the San Antonio Spurs’ five titles within a span of 16 seasons, culminating in 2014, as more impressive.
“What the Bulls did was amazing, but it began and ended with Jordan,” said Kerr, who played for both the Bulls and Spurs. “What the Spurs have done, what the Patriots have done, they went through several iterations. The Spurs have changed their team several times … So I think that’s a more impressive feat … The leagues change. The rules change. Can you adapt and survive? And can you do it with a system that’s basically set up for you to fail and to keep picking at the bottom of the draft?”
Patrick Ewing, the former college basketball great at Georgetown and NBA standout for the New York Knicks now coaching at his alma mater, was asked to compare the Patriots’ dynasty to Jordan’s Bulls.
Ewing stared and said, “I don’t like either of those teams.”
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The Patriots were shock-the-world underdogs when they beat the St. Louis Rams for their first Super Bowl title 16 years ago. So much has happened since.
“Every role has been played,” Bruschi said, “in terms of being an underdog, seeing if you can repeat, winning three out of four, trying to go undefeated, so many different experiences.”
The constants have been Kraft, Belichick and Brady. And Brady, the skinny kid from Michigan, has become an improbable NFL legend.
But even as the dynastic Patriots transformed into a team revolving around Brady, Belichick and his assistant-coaching lieutenants have kept the run of success going with shifting casts of characters around the quarterback.
“We’ve had tall receivers,” offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels said. “We’ve had fast receivers. We’ve had short, quick guys. We’ve had multiple tight ends. We’ve had pass-catching running backs. We’ve had backs that weigh 235 pounds. We’ve had linemen that may move better, and we’ve had other guys that are bigger … I think sometimes the word ‘system’ is overused. I think the best thing I can say for us is our foundation is broad enough that we can accommodate most players. And then take them in, figure out what we do well as a team and then try to do it as many times as we can.”
Belichick, better than anyone else, has made tough, unsentimental roster decisions over the years necessitated by the salary cap. His famed “Do your job” mantra has resulted in a Patriots’ Way that is more than just talk. McDaniels was asked what that entails.
“Just trying to be unselfish,” he said. “Do whatever is asked of you and your role to help the team win. Being flexible enough to maybe play a bigger role or a lesser role on a week-to-week basis. Coming to work with a great attitude. Being accountable and responsible for your duties and your job. And working hard to try to help the team in any way that you can.”
There also has been luck involved, from the improbable playoff victory over the Oakland Raiders en route to the first Super Bowl win in 2002 to the Seattle Seahawks trying to throw from the 1-yard line in 2015 to the Falcons abandoning their running game with a seemingly unassailable lead a year ago.
“Everybody thinks you’ve got to raise your game in the playoffs,” said Dungy, a key Patriots’ rival when he coached the Indianapolis Colts. “And you don’t. They play their game all the time. And you’ve got to be able to play your game for 60 minutes in a pressurized environment and not make mistakes. And when you do that, you have a chance to win. But if you make a mistake, if you can’t handle the moment, they’re going to play at a high level.”
Brady arrives at this Super Bowl at a different place in his life, with his family along and his children old enough to realize what’s going on.
“My kids this morning were saying, ‘Yeah, Daddy, all my friends said go win in the Super Bowl. Dad, go win in the Super Bowl,’ ” he said. “I think they’re just obviously much more aware now than they were even last year at this time. It’s just part of the growing-up process for them. I love having them here. They’re a great joy in my life.”
There was talk during the season of a rift between Belichick and Brady over the role of Brady’s trainer, Alex Guerrero. There was the recent ESPN report, denied by Kraft, that Kraft forced Belichick to make the trade-deadline deal this season that sent Brady’s backup and potential successor, Jimmy Garoppolo, to San Francisco. But this dynasty has endured far worse, given that the Patriots have lived through the Spygate and Deflategate scandals that so complicated their legacy, making them villains to detractors and victims of jealous rivals to supporters.
“Is it unfair?” Kraft said. “Every roof has a leak. Every heart has some sadness. You just work through it and you do your best. Someone out there will work hard to take us down. I hope it’s not this Sunday.”
But isn’t it good for the NFL, Kraft was asked, to have such a superpower of a team to provoke such passion on both sides?
“I think it’s good,” Kraft said. “But there are 31 other cities that don’t agree.”
The Washington Post’s Adam Kilgore and Ava Wallace in Washington, Tim Bontemps in Oakland and Chuck Culpepper in New York contributed to this report.