The Patriot Way: New England's Football Dynasty

Off to your right, behind those light towers rising from the Foxborough woods, is Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots. What happened inside those gates over two decades amounts to the most dominant run in the history of professional football in the United States.

The franchise started as the Boston Patriots back in nineteen fifty-nine, one of the founding members of the upstart American Football League. Billy Sullivan, a Boston businessman, secured the franchise that November for just twenty-five thousand dollars. For the first four decades, the Patriots were an afterthought, a team that lost more than it won and played wherever it could find a field. They wandered through four different stadiums before settling in Foxborough in nineteen seventy-one.

Then, in the year two thousand, two things happened that changed everything. Bill Belichick arrived as head coach. And a sixth-round draft pick from Michigan named Tom Brady sat quietly on the bench, waiting for his turn.

His turn came on September twenty-third, two thousand one, when starter Drew Bledsoe went down with a chest injury. Brady took over and never gave the job back. That February, he led the Patriots to a Super Bowl win over the heavily favored Saint Louis Rams, Adam Vinatieri's forty-eight-yard field goal splitting the uprights as time expired, final score twenty to seventeen.

What followed was unprecedented. Brady and Belichick won six Super Bowls together, appearing in nine total, a record no other quarterback-coach duo has matched. They beat the Carolina Panthers, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Seattle Seahawks, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Los Angeles Rams twice. Against Atlanta in Super Bowl fifty-one, they came back from twenty-eight to three down in the third quarter, the largest comeback in championship game history.

Belichick won two hundred sixty-six regular-season games with the Patriots, the third most regular-season wins by any coach in NFL history. Brady won thirty playoff games as a starter, nearly double the next closest quarterback. Together they built something the sport had never seen: a machine that recycled talent, adapted its schemes year to year, and kept winning for nineteen straight seasons.

The stadium itself opened in two thousand two, replacing the old Foxboro Stadium that had stood next door. With room for roughly sixty-four thousand six hundred fans, it sits on a stretch of Route One that on game days draws tens of thousands of fans from across New England, proof that the dynasty turned a wandering franchise into a regional religion.