Amid an NFL season in which no team has been particularly dominant, and even the expected title contenders have been fallible, what exactly New England’s strong start portends remains unclear. But for fans who love the Patriots and rivals who have loathed them, the possibility of the the franchise being good again this soon wasn’t among their 2025 expectations.
Barry Inciong first felt a change during New England’s unexpected October win at Buffalo. Soon after, interest surged in the gameday meet-ups he organizes between Patriots fans in Orange County, California, and at road games.
It suddenly felt like the clock had been turned back a decade.
“Now, we’re cheering against the Colts and Broncos for the (AFC) one seed,” he said.
The possibility of New England being truly good wasn’t on the radar for Brendan Cashman, a 48-year-old Patriots fan from suburban Boston. When his brothers discussed football last summer, it was often around the University of North Carolina’s upcoming season — not because any of them attended the school, but as a show of support for Belichick in his first season coaching in college.
“We don’t talk about that at all anymore,” Cashman said, because as soon as the Tar Heels flopped under Belichick, the family’s beloved NFL team was off to its best start since 2019, the last Patriots’ Super Bowl season.
New England’s leadership in recent seasons had been a disaster, Cashman said. His hopes for 2024, Maye’s rookie year, were so low that he mostly hoped the quarterback wouldn’t develop bad habits or get get seriously injured behind a threadbare offensive line.
This season, despite still being one of the most-sacked quarterbacks in the league, Maye has completed 32 passes of 20 yards or more, tied for second-most in the league. He has joined former MVPs Brady, Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers as the only quarterbacks in NFL history to record eight straight games in a single season with at least 200 passing yards and a passer rating of 100.
New England ranks in the top seven in both points scored and allowed, a placement among the league’s best teams also supported by EPA, a widely-used advanced statistic.
Seeing the team’s fortunes flip so quickly this fall had been “bizarre,” Cashman said. He called himself cautiously optimistic about the team’s future.
Maye “could be under siege and is still getting better throughout the course of the game,” Cashman said. “That is just so foreign for a 23-year-old quarterback. Even last week, getting sacked five times by Cleveland, and really not impacting his play at all — it just seems all kind of like too good to be true.”
Few quarterbacks in NFL history have inspired such devoted loyalty from their fan base as Brady, the star who dated actresses and models and was married to a supermodel. Yet, the 23-year-old Maye has been quickly embraced. His appearance at a Boston-area high school football game last month became local news. Social media posts by Maye’s wife — the two began dating when they were 12 — are flooded with adoring comments.
“Your husband is the reason I wake up every day,” said one.
