Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: The New England Patriots, who are just outside of frame here. I swear it.
Kenny Walker is damn lucky no Patriot defender caught up with him, otherwise there would have been heckfire to pay!
Your 2025 record: 14-3. AFC champions. Perfect. Fan-fucking-tastic. Just what you and I needed as the world burns outside: the resurgence of the New England Fucking Patriots. This team was a joke two years ago, and America was happier for it. But God forbid that you and I get just one nice goddamn thing in our lives. Why don’t you feed me some tainted romaine and force me to shit into a bucket for three hours straight while you’re at it, God? You monster.
Anyway, the 2025 Patriots returned to preeminence thanks to a schedule that the FTN Almanac graded as, no lie, the easiest schedule that any NFL team has had this century. Join me now as I take you through the succession of heavyweights these Pats managed to defeat, in order:
REGULAR SEASON
- Miami Dolphins (a joke of a franchise since the 1980s)
- Carolina Panthers (not a real NFL team)
- Buffalo Bills (couldn’t win a big game if they were wearing stolen Pats uniforms)
- New Orleans Saints (the Ghislaine Maxwell of NFL teams)
- Tennessee Titans (mid-collapse for the fourth straight season)
- Cleveland Browns (still angling to sign Rae Carruth)
- Atlanta Falcons (stuck in the 28-3 dimension for the rest of this planet’s lifespan)
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers (misses Tom Brady even more than you now do)
- New York Jets (oh GTFO, this shit doesn’t count)
- Cincinnati Bengals (no Joe Burrow)
- New York Giants (collective brainpower of a mechanical pencil)
- Baltimore Ravens (lost Lamar Jackson in the second quarter)
- New York Jets (no seriously, get the fuck out of my face and don’t come back until you’re in a coffin)
PLAYOFFS:
- Los Angeles Chargers (choke harder than Jim Harbaugh being forced to digest an AOC TikTok)
- Houston Texans (have a QB that came into the game pre-lobotomized)
- Denver Broncos (minus Bo Nix, game played in minus-90 percent visibility)
The average 16-year-old has a more impressive résumé.
There were some losses mixed in with all of the above “triumphs,” thankfully. Like when the Pats got torched by Geno Smith and the Raiders in the opening week of the season. Or when Pittsburgh beat them after Aaron Rodgers hit someone named Calvin Austin for the game-winning score. Or when the Bills avenged their earlier loss to New England by storming back from 21-0 down in Foxboro. All of that was good and tasty. Mmmm yummy Pats losses NOM NOM NOM.
But those snacklings provided little in the way of solace as the rest of us watched, helplessly, as Bobby Kraft’s glorified flag football team defaulted its way all the way to the Super Bowl. So God bless the NFC champion Seattle Seahawks for providing a season’s worth of catharsis in 60 tidy minutes. Here’s MVP candidate turned latter-day Tony Eason Drake Maye throwing a 500 ball into triple coverage just when his offense was threatening to make the game almost kinda sorta maybe interesting. And what’s this? Why, it’s Maye throwing a Jameis Winston–grade pick-six on New England’s very next possession! I like to watch that one while I’m in the nude.
New England didn’t score until the fourth quarter of this game. They surrendered 135 yards on the ground to Seahawks part-time RB Kenneth Walker, watched their O-line completely fall apart and give up six sacks, and punted on their first eight offensive possessions. Michael Dukakis made for a stauncher opponent than these clowns. It was the happiest I’ve been since Johnny Most died.
Your coach: They were porkin’. Everybody knows it.
Your head coach is Mike Vrabel, who celebrated his team’s miraculous turnaround by continuing what appears to have been a yearslong affair with former Athletic scoopster Dianna Russini. I can’t wait for photos of these two going to prom together to surface.
Vrabel and Russini were equally culpable for this continuous display of brazen idiocy, but of course only Russini was the one who ended up out of a job and essentially forced into hiding. Vrabel, by contrast, was “punished” by having to excuse himself from Day 3 of April’s draft to attend counseling sessions with his mortified wife. I’m sure Vrabel tearfully apologized to his wife for being a distraction, and not executing. Then he probably drove to a nearby Hilton Garden Inn to pork one of his other mistresses. Vrabel and Russini were spotted stepping out at adults-only resorts, in bars, at a casino, on a private boat, and probably at Plato’s Retreat. At least Bob Kraft had the common courtesy to let his wife die before he went cruising for paid handjobs. But Vrabel reassured America that this Russini silliness meant nothing to him. Nothing!
I love Jen, I love the boys [Tyler and Carter], I love my personal friends.
I too love my personal friends. The other day I told my buddy Howard, “Howard, you are my best personal friend.” Then he said, “You too, best personal friend.” And then we hugged.
The unfortunately named Zak Kuhr takes over as defensive coordinator full-time after former DC Terrell Williams contracted cancer in the middle of last season and got promoted to assistant head coach on this year’s staff. Offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels is a real fuckface.
Your quarterback: Drake Maye, who wasn’t such a hotshot when he had to face a real defense for the very first time in Super Bowl XXVLXCXMJ. In the face of relentless pressure, Maye herped and derped his way to 48 passing yards in the first half of that game, which, to be fair, put him on pace to surpass the whopping 86 yards passing that he posted in the AFC title game. [Bill Belichick voice] This guy is a weapon.
The good news here is that New England GM Eliot Wolf fortified the Pats’ hideous pass protection this offseason by signing former Jets G Alijah Vera-Tucker to a fat contract. AJT missed the second half of the 2022 season with a torn triceps muscle. Then he missed nearly all of 2023 with a torn Achilles. Then, just before the Jets 2025 campaign was about to begin, he tore his triceps again and missed all of that season. Still, what a free-agent catch! You are more likely to run into a still-alive Jimmy Hoffa on the street than see this man suit up for more than two games this season.
This is where I note, again via FTN, that the Patriots had the fewest Adjusted Games Lost to injury in 2025. So not only did they need Auburn’s out-of-conference schedule to win the AFC, they also needed every player on their roster to make it through 17 games without a scratch. Regression is gonna hit Maye and company even harder than the Seahawks’ front seven did. And should Maye get a booboo that keeps him out for an extended stretch, guess who’s your backup option?
That’s Tommy Cutlets, who loves to take sacks almost as much as he loves his personal friends. You guys will be begging for the return of Bailey Zappe by Week 8.
What’s new that sucks: The fabled missing piece.
That’s former Eagles headache WR A.J. Brown, whom Philadelphia traded away at full cap space this spring because they were so sick of him. On paper, Brown and Maye make for a dream pairing. No other AFC QB is better at hunting for explosives (and connecting on them) than Maye. And no wideout is better at high-pointing the ball and making contested catches way downfield than Brown. But Brown is 29 years old and coming off a season where he sprinkled more poison around the Eagles locker room than Terrell Owens did back in his driveway sit-ups heyday. He also half-assed it during games, and not in the cool, rope-a-dope, Randy Moss kind of way.
No, A.J. Brown is well into the “the enemy speaks kindly & holds a knife” phase of his career. No wideout goes back to being normal from here, and the Pats should know that given that they employed Stefon Diggs not but a season ago (by the way, Diggs ended 2025 with a higher PFF receiving grade than Brown). Join us at midseason when Vrabel feeds damning locker-room intel on Brown to whatever new access merchant he happens to be fucking.
Wolf also boosted Maye’s arsenal, in theory, by signing WR Romeo Doubs away from Green Bay. Despite having Pro Bowl QBs throwing to him throughout his career, Doubs has never topped more than 750 yards receiving in any single season, has 25 career drops, and looks stupid in a guardian cap. But he arrives in Foxboro with that Packers glaze dripping from his body, so the football media still has their cheese goggles on for him. They’ll tell you that Doubs somehow represents an upgrade over the since-traded Kayshon Boutte, despite the fact that Boutte posted relatively equal yardage numbers and had a lower drop rate. I fucking hate Romeo Doubs.
Wolf also extended TE Hunter Henry, who is not Hayden Hurst.
The good news (for me) is that those moves represent the totality of New England’s efforts to upgrade this offense over the offseason. Vera-Tucker can only improve this line if he can go 10 minutes without tearing something, and the only other outside addition they made to that unit was depth G Greg Van Roten. That means that Maye’s health will again be almost wholly reliant on the tiny baby arms of LT Will Campbell holding his blocks for minutes at a time as his QB looks for Brown downfield. Your RT is still Morgan Moses, who’s older than his biblical namesake. Moses is so old, he was playing right tackle during Kirk Cousins’s first full season as a starter in Washington. Presumably he spends his off-the-field time sharing a hospice room with Old Man Kraft. Newly drafted OT Caleb Lomu had a shit camp, so he’ll be useless.
And don’t expect much improvement from the Pats’ ground game, one of the league’s worst a season ago. Your RB platoon still consists of fumble addict Rhamondre Stevenson and second-year man TreVeyon Henderson, who’s already nursing a bum ankle. That means that Maye will be forced to call his own number more times than is comfortable. And he won’t have a surprise Denver blizzard to hoodwink defenders this time around. Your first four opponents on the schedule this season are Seattle, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville, and Buffalo. REAL football teams. Maye will need to have a lung removed after running that gauntlet.
Like the offense, New England’s defense will only prosper if all of its key cogs (DTs Christian Barmore and Milton Williams, CB Christian Gonzalez) can stay fully healthy all season long, something the trio couldn’t even manage during that Make-A-Wish season a year ago. Rotational EDGE Dre’Mont Jones is about the only significant addition here. The most entertaining thing about the 2026 Pats will be Vrabel clumsily evading comment about Russini at every presser after a new batch of photos drops. A.J. Brown can vaguepost all season long and he’ll still only be the second-biggest distraction on this team. When you guys miss the playoffs, Barmore will probably take it out on his girlfriend again.
Kraft and Bill Belichick again got the stiffarm from the Hall of Fame because everyone hates them. THIS is how you do pettiness, BBWAA. Take notes.
Mack Hollins isn’t good enough of a WR to be such a fucking weirdo.
What has always sucked: Foxboro is where you go to live in witness protection. Bob Kraft is a cheapskate who’ll never pay Gonzalez what he’s worth. Dave Portnoy gets fatter in every ad. Bill Simmons can’t write and needs his kid’s Masshole boyfriend to place doomed parlays for him. The Celtics probably traded Jaylen Brown because he wasn’t Catholic enough. Bill Belichick is hitting on your preschooler as I write this. Len Bias is still dead. I hope your team bus catches on fire.
What might not suck: The Pats Rivals unis are fucking awesome, especially the whitened helmet logo. Makes the flying Elvis look like a ghost! More teams should look like a haunted house.
HEAR IT FROM PATRIOTS FANS!
Joe:
We had a Cinderella season and when midnight struck, our coach turned into an eggplant emoji.
James:
Impressed to see this team embrace cheating as more than strictly an on-the-field endeavor.
Patrick:
Our hunt for seven wins this upcoming first place schedule will be more embarrassing than Mike Vrabel texting about 6th round draft picks from his marriage counseling session.
Joey:
Went to a family Super Bowl party. My cousins' kids were upstairs playing Fortnite for half of it. I should have joined them.
Chris:
The Super Bowl served as a reminder that the glory days are firmly in the rearview mirror. David Tyree can still eat my ass.
Rhyan:
Mike Vrabel saw the cheating couple get caught at the Coldplay concert in Gilette and thought, “Hold my illegitimate son.”
The Pats traded for AJ Brown, who was still available when they drafted N'Keal Harry.
Robert Kraft got caught getting a handy before the 2018 AFFCG and has been acting like Jerry Jones ever since.
Steve:
No one here understands or appreciates that 2025 was a Cinderella season that will go down as this Pats administration’s high-water mark instead of the start of another dynastic run. They overachieved against an easy schedule and an obliterated AFC playoff field. It was lightning in a bottle. We were the Jake Delhomme Panthers, the Rex Grossman Bears, the Matt Ryan Falcons.
Bob Kraft has a net worth of over $13 billion and still sees fit to sue a town of 20,000 people over a six-figure invoice for security fees.
Tugg:
I too like to arrive ahead of schedule and promptly shit my pants.
Matthew:
Hunter Henry is the most dreadfully boring 11.5 fantasy points you'll get by 2:30 every single week.
Chris:
Even when the team wins we'll have to watch Bob Kraft shuffle into the postgame locker room and dedicate the game ball to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Fuck David Tyree.
Lee:
The most interesting thing about Drake Maye was his wife’s Christmas cooking last year.
Jack O.:
The shelf life of Vrabel's Russini defense was shorter than Will Campbell's arms.
Roman:
Mack Hollins is going to start a podcast that's worse than Pat McAfee and Joe Rogan combined after he retires.
Rob:
Maine is the whitest state in the Union at 94%, and yet somehow still has ICE murdering the one person of color in town. Vermont is the second whitest state, whose residents are either good ol’ boys indistinguishable from those in Alabama, or ultra liberal PhDs who nonetheless will not vote to fund the public schools because they want to buy a second Audi for their daughter to take with them to Wellesley once they’ve graduated from private boarding school. New Hampshire is Vermont plus a face tattoo and minus the education. Connecticut doesn’t count, as it is just East New York and full of Giants fans who deserve that fate.
My daughter once fell down playing Capture the Flag at camp and tore up her leg. For unknowable reasons she told the camp nurse, “My parents are going to call me stupid.” Nurse’s response: “Are they from Massachusetts?” That devastating and correct own accurately represents both my home state and childhood. I hope she grows up and moves to Canada one day. Fuck New England.
David:
The Pats are sleazy attention whores masquerading as one of the league's model franchises. I'm glad the Seahawks made us eat shit on the grandest stage possible last season. That entire campaign was fraudulent from the fucking jump, and we all fucking knew it.
Greg:
Six states in New England and they gave our Super Bowl celebrity introduction to a guy from goddamned New Jersey.
Allison:
This team got too far too fast and now we have to watch Maye and Vrabel make even more boneheaded decisions against actually legitimate teams. Vrabel gets to keep his career while Dianna Russini got fired. I hate this fucking team.
Jonathan:
After managing a surprising 14-3 record and a fortunate run through the playoffs, the team arrived at the Super Bowl and promptly set themselves on fire and then fell headfirst into a dumpster. It was as if having an offensive line that looked like comedic picadors, B-level receivers and an iffy running game suddenly became an impediment to victory. Who knew?
Looking forward to a 5-12 season and a blissful respite from having a rooting interest in the Super Bowl.
Tim:
Vrabel hammered the final nail into his coffin with his own dick before the Super Bowl loss was even a month in the rearview.
Tavis:
Last year I moved from Washington, DC back to New England. The worst part of it is that I have to listen to an entire region of people earnestly say things like, "We're right back where we belong", as if the last year's Super Bowl run was not the result of a schedule so soft that Charmin would be embarrassed and every functional quarterback getting injured at just the right time.
In the meantime, we have to listen to people talk up a quarterback who sounds about as smart as Forrest Gump only slightly more excited, his beer-chugging lineman bodyguard LT-Rex, and the best cornerback in the league whom they will not pay. All coached up by Diana Russini's sidepiece, who was outfoxed by PETE CARROLL in the last calendar year. The schadenfruede from literally everywhere else could be deafening.
Tom Brady looks like Max Headroom now.
Cameron:
Fuck Robert Kraft for being an old pervert, Mike Vrabel for having the most obvious affair since Brad and Angelina, and fuck me for mustering the strength to care about this team after 2019.
James:
Actual football alien and "guy who blew up his marriage to go 9-8 with Todd Bowles" Tom Brady is currently the most normal person of the New England Dynasty Triad. Fuck.
Kate:
No NFL team puffs out their chest more about how they’re above everyone else when it comes to valuing integrity and family, yet no team is as equal parts horny, stupid, and shameless as these assholes.
The Patriots don’t give a shit about their players’ families or kids. Southeastern Massachusetts has been featured on CourtTV non-stop for four goddamn years. I heard a guy call into sports radio about what his wife is and isn’t allowed to do during Pats games. The fill-in host pushed back on him, so he got called a “pussy.”
Fuck Bob Kraft, fuck Mike Vrabel, and fuck this hypocritical, violent, whiny fanbase with Belichick’s infected nipple piercing.
Aaron:
I will absolutely turn on AJ Brown if he doesn’t make an insane catch in the playoffs because “Gronk or Jules woulda had that.”
Jeremy:
Troy Vincent, if you're reading this, fuck off. I'll outlive you if it kills me.
Bridget Moynahan, you seem lovely and deserved better.
Mitch:
I spent the week leading up to the wild card round giddy that America was finally going to witness the Drake Maye I'd been watching all year: the hyper-efficient passing machine who tossed bombs like Marino and rushed like Cunningham. Then the playoffs started and he spent four games getting his dick kicked in. Yes, a lot of that was due to the still-lousy offensive line, but he looked like a fraud, the team looked like frauds, and the 29-13 final score of Super Bowl LX was, if anything, charitable.
Also our head coach got caught red-handed for conducting a years-long extramarital affair with an NFL reporter and you would never know it reading the local press.
Jeremy:
Elliot Wolf was working in the Patriots’ front office when they let a good homegrown receiver (Jakobi Meyers) walk in favor of signing an overvalued free agent (JuJu Smith-Schuster). The apparent lesson he learned from that fiasco was to trade Maye’s most trusted deep threat (Kayshon Boutte) and then give $17M/year to Romeo Doubs, a WR whom Packers fans will miss as much as NFL fans will miss the Pro Bowl.
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