New England Patriots

While the New England Patriots had been to two Super Bowl games in the past, losing 46-10 to the Chicago Bears in 1985 at Super Bowl XX and 35-21 to the Green Bay Packers in 1996 at Super Bowl XXXI, when the Pats suited up in the first year of the new millennium following a season when the team had gone 5-11, no one could have predicted what was to come. With an inexperienced and unproven coach in Bill Belichick and a starting quarterback named Tom Brady, selected 199th in the 2000 Draft and only playing because of a severe injury to Drew Bledsoe, Patriots fans did not head into the 2001 season with particularly high hopes. Little did anyone know the phenomenon that Brady would prove to be, leading the Pats to an 11-5 regular season before outlasting the Oakland Raiders 16-13 in overtime, besting the Pittsburgh Steelers 24-17 in the AFC Championship, and upsetting the heavily favored St. Louis Rams 20-17 in Super Bowl XXXVI to claim New England’s first-ever NFL title (surely few other championship runs have been marked by such close margins in every game!). Tom Brady also won his first Super Bowl MVP trophy, but definitely not his last. The Patriots, led by Belichick and Brady, went on to win five more Super Bowls between 2003-2018 and lost three as well, including a heartbreaking 17-14 defeat in 2007 in Super Bowl XLII at the hands of the New York Giants. These six victories made the New England Patriots of the 2000s into the NFL’s greatest-ever dynasty and the league’s most successful team of all time. Success brought detractors as well as fans, with many outside New England dubbing the Pats “the Evil Empire” and delighting in the (admittedly rare) occasions when the team failed to win. Brady and the Pats came in for their largest share of opprobrium (and mockery by every late-night talk show host in America) after the Deflategate scandal of 2015, in which the Patriots were alleged (and found) to have provided under-inflated balls for their 2015 AFC Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. The Pats were fined, and Brady was suspended for four games, but they still won Super Bowl LI in 2016 anyway. Since Brady’s departure to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2019 (where he won his seventh Super Bowl), the Patriots have struggled, but with Belichick still at the helm, many fans (and haters) will be keeping an eye on New England in future seasons to see if the dynasty can truly outlast the loss of one of the best quarterbacks ever to play the game. Read more about our tips on "How to Get Cheap Patriots Tickets Today" on TicketX Magazine.