The Long, Cold Season Ahead

It's safe to say this year's version of the New England Patriots aren't expected to be very good, and this allows Shank to smother the Krafts like a wet blanket:

With this new era of Patriots history, we might be in for a long, cold football season

The Patriots open their season Sunday at Cincinnati and are consensus favorites to be one of the NFL’s worst teams.

It feels like we’re in for a long, cold football season. By any measure, these are the most barren days of Bob Kraft’s ownership, which dates back to 1994. After two decades of NFL dominance, the Patriots are in full decline.

They haven’t won a playoff game since 2019 and are coming off a four-win season — their worst since the 2-14 Dick MacPherson campaign of 1992 when Hugh Millen and Scott Zolak were New England’s quarterbacks.

The good news for Bob and Jonathan Kraft is that they have control of their franchise for the first time this century. For the last 24 years, the team was largely under the powerful thumb of Bill Belichick, who won 17 AFC East titles, nine conference championships, and six Super Bowls. It started to go south when Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay in the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, and four days after last season’s final game — a home loss to the (gulp) Jets — Belichick was fired by Bob Kraft.

You can tell by Shank's style and enthusiasm that when he's over a target, he just opens the bomb bay doors and carpet bombs the place. I trust we'll see more of these columns in the upcoming weeks.