The game: Patriots at Bengals
The beer: Sacred Profane Smoked Dark Lager
The result: Win, 26–20
The record: 10–2
The headline: “I’m gonna keep on doin’ what I’m doin’ till I can’t do what I’m doin’ no more.” – Isley Brothers, “Keep on Doin’”

The commentary: You can only play the teams on your schedule and win (or lose) the games that can be won (or lost). Entering this season I thought ten wins was the ceiling through eighteen weeks, never mind twelve. Should the Pats have defeated Rhamondre Stevenson the Steelers in week three? Probably. Did they overdose on heroin overachieve against the Bills two weeks later? Goodness knows! Well, tough shit, everyone. Bill Parcells said it: “You are what your record says you are.”

Be afraid, America: the New England Patriots are very much back

I think America has a lot more to fear with Trump and the Klan running things but, sure, I’ll go along with this.

In The Usual Suspects, the stone-cold-classic 1995 crime thriller, the bad guys seem pretty obvious—blindingly so, really, loud and in your face and claiming all of your attention every time they’re onscreen. But the real villain is lurking right there in plain sight, an apparently broken wretch who’s been pulling the strings all along without anyone noticing.

I put The Usual Suspects in italics instead of your quotation marks because, you know, it’s pretty standard style. So standard that you did it correctly in your final paragraph. You’re welcome.

Why do I lead an NFL column with a reference to a thirty-year-old movie about a villain hiding in plain sight? Oh, I don’t know… have you checked the AFC East standings lately?

It still doesn’t make sense—I assume you and your partner rewatched it Friday night. “Is it Friday already?”

The New England Patriots are back, friends. Winners of nine straight, led by an old-school lead-with-the-forehead head coach, quarterbacked by the best signal-caller to join the NFL since the pandemic, held together by one of the top scoring defenses in the league, the Patriots are now officially a legitimate capital-P Problem for the rest of the league. Again.

Senior writer Jay Busbee might as well be writing in double-spaced Palatino to pad this column. As someone who once filled a sophomore English essay’s opening paragraph by rephrasing the topic sentence over and over, probably regarding a book I didn’t actually read (The Great Gatsby?), I see through this.

You can understand why the NFL universe might be troubled by this development. After Tom Brady left the Greater Boston area for Florida and Bill Belichick decided to go re-enact the plot of Old School…

Saturday night rewatch.

…the NFL thought it was done with the Pats for a decade or so. The Chiefs took up the “new dynasty” mantle, and everyone safely relegated the Pats to the six-win bin along with the Jets and the Titans.

Six Super Bowl wins? Oh, I guess not.

Nightmares are never as scary in the daylight, and the Patriots’ two-decade run through the NFL faded into memory. Until this season.

[Changes channel.]

Patty: I’ll be testing you. When you do good, I use the green pen. When you do bad, I use the red pen. Any questions?

Otto: Yeah, one. Have you always been a chick? I mean, you know, I don’t want to offend you, but you were born a man, weren’t you? You can tell me. I’m open-minded.

Patty: [Drops green pen.] I won’t be needing this!

I’ll take that red pen now, Patty.

[…] Mike Vrabel has rebooted the culture in New England, bringing back the Belichickian swagger but not the needless Belichickian crustiness.

Belichickian Crustiness, playing in back-alley theaters across Chapel Hill.

[…] The results have been obvious, as has the praise from players up and down the roster. “I think he has done a great job bringing us close together as a team, helping us to play for each other, not just for ourselves,” running back TreVeyon Henderson said after New England’s win over Cleveland.

This is great, of course, but how many players across the league are all “Our coach is a probably impotent”?

[…] Drake Maye himself is a key factor in the Patriots’ renaissance. His 3,130 yards (without a bye) lead the league. He ranks second in yards per completion at 8.8 (to Sam Darnold) and passer rating of 110.7 (to Matthew Stafford), and as a result is very much in the MVP conversation. It’s way too early to compare him to You Know Who, but a reliable young quarterback is a rare asset in the modern NFL.

[Vibrating.]

And if you’ve got a quarterback with this kind of touch…

[Nazi Twitter clip of Maye’s touchdown bomb to Kyle Williams against the Buccaneers, captioned “Top-tier stuff.”]

…good things will follow.

I know sports personalities would lose engagement (and eventually rebuild it elsewhere) by leaving Nazi Twitter but, come on, it’s called Nazi Twitter! Enough already.

Five games remain in the regular season for New England. […] Get into the playoffs—and they’re ninety-nine percent likely to do so, per NFL.com—and the Patriots can do all kinds of damage. Again.

This “Again” motif would work better with a third occurrence.

“You want high expectations,” Maye said prior to the start of the season. “This city, the Patriots are used to winning, and that’s what we’re trying to get back to.”

Foxborough, Massachusetts is a town.

Pat Patriot isn’t walking with a limp anymore, and the rest of the NFL has dropped its coffee cup. Only difference between this Patriots season and The Usual Suspects: the Pats’ season isn’t anywhere close to finished.

This is such a weird closing paragraph—I know Busbee wants to return to his opening… theme?… that was otherwise ignored throughout the column, but what the hell? “This random thing is so thirty years ago, and the Patriots are not!” You picked the movie! Anyway, it pleases me to no end that Roku features Dan Hedaya as (Sergeant Rabin) on its poster. It all makes sense when you look at it right.

Elsewhere in “The Media Says This??”

NFL trends through Week 12: Bengals, Giants, Patriots, Bears

I smell a data dump!

[…] I used my DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) stats […]

“DVOA”? Delta Variant Overwhelms America… Dromboid Versus Overbearing Asshole… wait a minute, didn’t we agree it should be “DAVOA”? Da Analytics Vroom Orgasm Alright! Let’s jump to the good guys.

The Patriots have the second-worst DVOA for a 10–2 team since 1978
The Patriots are one of the best stories in the NFL this year. They currently hold the top spot in the AFC playoff race, having already won more games in 2025 than they did in 2023 and 2024 combined. So it’s a bit disappointing that the underlying stats say the Pats are not even close to being the best team in the league. In fact, DVOA has them seventeenth with a below-average rating. The only other 10–2 team to have a below-average DVOA was the 2022 Vikings. That team lost in the wild-card round.

Hang it up, fellas, season’s over.

Quarterback Drake Maye is truly an MVP candidate, and the Patriots rank fifth in pass offense DVOA […] The average Pats opponent so far has a DVOA of minus fifteen percent […]

Jesus, “DVOA” appears twenty-nine times in this article, excluding data tables. Who wrote this, Don Victor Oscar Areola?

Aaron Schatz is an NFL analyst for ESPN.com. He has more than twenty years of experience working in NFL analytics and is the creator of the DVOA and DYAR metric.

“DYAR” is when you spout statistics in a pirate voice. Onward:

What we can expect: The rest of the Patriots’ schedule gets a little harder, including a rematch with the Bills (at home) and a game in Baltimore. So their final schedule strength would currently be the third easiest ever rather than the easiest. It’s certainly possible that they will play better and win by larger margins in their remaining games, including this week’s Monday Night Football game against the Giants.

“You are what your record says you are.”

However, the Patriots have been very healthy this season, and that has changed in the past couple of weeks. They’re going to have to play the next few games without some of their top players, including rookie left tackle Will Campbell (knee) and veteran defensive tackle Milton Williams (ankle).

This is much too relevant for your analysis so far. Gimme IAMBIC or something, “Injuries Above Marlon Brando Indigestion Composite.”

The good news is that some of the other teams with low DVOA ratings at 10–2 improved over the last few games and went on significant playoff runs. That includes a team that Patriots fans know well: their 2003 squad, which was dragged down in all metrics by a 31–0 loss to the Bills in week one but ended up winning the Super Bowl.

It’s bullshit no matter how you spin it. Why watch the games at all? Shudder.

Lastly, my man Oliver “Ollie” Connolly at the Guardian cracked me up with this throwaway line. Emphasis mine.

Tom Brady’s part-time side hustle with the Raiders is an unholy mess
[…] What is the path forward? Will [Pete] Carroll be back or [John] Spytek or [Geno] Smith? And who actually makes those decisions, Brady or [Mark] Davis? How can a team operate when its most powerful decision-maker logs in occasionally, signs off franchise-altering moves and then vanishes on side quests? […]

Give him the Pulitzer Prize right now.

Up next: “On Monday night, [the Giants] get the Patriots, who are just twenty-eighth in run offense DVOA.” Aaron, stop it. Happy Thanksgiving!