On November 4th, Tom Brady revealed that his new dog, Junie, was a clone of his old dog Lua, a pit-bull mix who died in 2023. This felt unsurprising somehow, perhaps because Brady seems more and more like a resident of the uncanny valley himself. It was also not at all shocking that this news coincided with an announcement from the company that cloned the dog, Colossal Biosciences, about its acquisition of the biotech firm ViaGen Pets & Equine. Brady just happens to be a Colossal investor. This was a bit of grief leveraged into brand expansion.

Since retiring from football three years ago, Brady has unretired from the game, retired again, got divorced, become a part owner of the moribund Las Vegas Raiders (current record: 2–7), and acquired a stake in Birmingham City F.C., a fútbol club in England’s second tier. (There was, naturally, an Amazon Prime docuseries about this last endeavor, in which Brady disparaged the coach and the team, and said “fuck.”) He has also signed up to play flag football in sunny Saudi Arabia and agreed to a ten-year, three-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar broadcasting contract with Fox, where his primary contribution so far has been to punctuate big plays with a well-timed “Oooh!” Meanwhile, Brady’s old coach Bill Belichick has been suffering a series of humiliations so well documented that even mentioning them now feels like piling on.

Every empire ends in ruin, with toppled statues and gloating enemies. No one is weeping for New England Patriots fans—not with their six Lombardi trophies and their repeated grim marches to glory. The Patriots have reached nine Super Bowls in the twenty-first century, far more than any other team. They won seventeen division titles in nineteen years. Brady remains the undisputed GOAT. Still, the decline and fall of the Patriots during the past several years had been startling to witness. Ever since the team was upset in the 2019 playoffs, by the Tennessee Titans, and Brady left New England for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the franchise has been in near-total disarray. The team parted ways, as they put it, with Belichick in 2024, after a 4–13 season; the offense ranked thirty-first in the league that year, out of thirty-two teams. Belichick’s successor, Jerod Mayo, lasted a single season, and produced a record that was no better.

He was replaced by the coach of that Titans team which ended the Patriots’ era of dominance, Mike Vrabel, who also played eight seasons with the Pats under Belichick, winning three Super Bowls. But there wasn’t much hope that the Patriots’ fortunes would change dramatically this season. For all the luck involved in football, bad teams tend to be bad for a reason, or for several—and, although the league is structured to encourage competitive parity, negative-feedback loops are hard to escape. (Just ask the Cleveland Browns, or any team from New York.) The worst teams tend to get the best young quarterbacks in the draft, and then squander them, if they don’t ruin them completely. New England, true to form, drafted the promising quarterback Drake Maye with the third pick in 2024, then made him the team’s starter in October, behind a porous offensive line and with no one to throw to. In thirteen games, he threw ten interceptions. The following off-season, the team’s moves were not wholly inspiring. Stefon Diggs, a thirty-one-year-old wide receiver coming off an A.C.L. tear, was the team’s big signing; a pair of rookies were tasked with shoring up the offensive line; and the team’s former offensive coördinator Josh McDaniels was brought back to his old role, after a stint as the head coach of the Raiders that was so terrible that players apparently brought out cigars after he was fired. (“Outside of maybe Urban Meyer, there’s a pretty strong case to be made that McDaniels is the worst head-coaching hire of the past two decades,” the sportswriter Bill Barnwell wrote in ESPN afterward.) The Patriots began the season 1–2, narrowly beating the hopeless Miami Dolphins and losing to the Raiders and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But there were signs during that win against the Dolphins that this year might be different. Maye completed nineteen out of twenty-three passes, for two hundred and thirty yards, throwing for two touchdowns and rushing for another. The game’s real highlight, though, came at the end, when the running back Antonio Gibson returned a kick ninety yards for a score—and Vrabel chased him along the sideline in excitement. When was the last time anyone in New England looked like they were having fun?

Since the loss to the Steelers, the Patriots have won eight straight. They’re atop the A.F.C. East, with a good chance to secure a first-round bye in the playoffs. On Thursday, at home, they avoided an embarrassing loss to one of those New York teams, the Jets—a trap game if ever there was one. What stood out most was what now seems unremarkable: the quarterback playing up to increasingly lofty expectations, serenaded by chants of “M.V.P.!” Maye threw fewer of the spectacular deep throws that he has become known for, but that was a sign of growth: he seemed content to take the yardage that was given to him; nothing was forced. He completed his first eleven pass attempts of the night, and even after cooling off didn’t turn the ball over once. Again and again, he showed how well he can move, dodging pressure and sliding through danger to find open receivers, whether it meant making difficult throws over the middle while on the run or taking the quick out.

But about those deep throws! Nothing has brought life back to Foxborough like the rocketing spirals Maye has been launching downfield. Last season, New England ranked thirty-first in explosive-pass rate, or how often a play gains at least twenty yards. They were thirtieth in that metric the season prior. Now Maye is considered one of the best in the league at long throws, Diggs is having a resurgence, and the team has developed a few of its other receivers into deep-ball threats. There is no doubt that the culture in New England has changed. Vrabel has a tradition of greeting each player on the way to the locker room after games, and the coaches are quick to praise the players. (This was not Belichick’s forte.) The players, for their part, deflect the praise; they speak about one another with delight and awe. The team seems to have found that elusive balance of confidence and calm, accountability and community, which characterizes many excellent teams. There appears to be a willingness to take big risks on the basis of trust.

Where does that trust come from? Sports narratives inevitably have a teleological dimension. Once the ending is known, everything that leads up to it seems to be instruments of that end. In a well-sourced account of the Patriots’ renaissance in the Substack Go Long last month, the football journalist Tyler Dunne noted that, shortly after Vrabel became head coach, he discovered trash in the sauna and dirty washcloths littering the floor of the locker room. He immediately instructed the players to treat their workplace, and the people who cleaned it, with respect. The players understood that the point wasn’t simply civility. It was winning. “If you want to win, you do the small things,” the running back Antonio Gibson said. Dunne’s story was full of details like that. In Dunne’s telling, Josh McDaniels isn’t an asshole; he’s the perfect coach for a hungry and talented young quarterback. Vrabel’s smashmouth style isn’t old-school brutality but necessary toughness. The cultural shift is oriented around the team’s newfound success.

Maybe so. Vrabel is right: respect really does begin at home. Different personalities mesh differently, and what doesn’t work in one situation might be just the thing in another. Maye seems to be thriving under the guidance of McDaniels, whose mastery of the Patriots’ offense has never been in doubt. “It’s fun to be in the headset with him,” Maye said recently, of McDaniels.

It’s also undeniable that the Patriots have had an unusually easy schedule, and perhaps they look great because they’re playing weak opponents. Through eleven games, the teams they have beaten have a combined record of 30–54, and the Patriots have the easiest remaining schedule in the N.F.L. In fact, one measure pegs the Patriots’ schedule as the third-easiest in the N.F.L. since 1978. Clearing the sauna of debris might not have been instrumental, after all. And if a few things had gone in another direction, if a few loose balls thrown by Maye on Thursday night had been intercepted, or if Antonio Brown hadn’t outrun the Dolphins and the Patriots had begun the season 0–3, some stories—such as the one about how Vrabel emerged from a preseason brawl between the Patriots and the Washington Commanders with a bloody face—might sound a little different. Maye has been having a fantastic season. He might really win M.V.P., but he’s been sacked more than any other quarterback (among qualified starters) except one, and over all the Patriots offense has been middling. Take away a few of those thrilling plays, and we might be telling a different story.

But what’s true of negative-feedback loops is also true of positive ones. Encouragement becomes courage. Luck starts to seem like fate. For years, the Patriots couldn’t catch a break. Then came Brady—the hundred-and-ninety-ninth pick in the draft—and the team’s fortunes changed entirely. Losers become winners, until the cycle repeats itself. ♦