After Amelia Earhart’s airplane and Jimmy Hoffa’s body, scholars will be searching long and hard for any evidence that leads to an actual pass interference penalty on the Patriots’ seventh offensive play Sunday.
The play where DeMario Douglas zig-zagged through a sad-sack Saints secondary for a touchdown, then returned to the sideline and got yanked back with the rest of the offense.
No touchdown. No completion. Back it up, everybody. Try again.
“It was a really late call. I think we were on the sideline,” Drake Maye said post-game. “I was about to sit down.”
Countless fraught flags followed in New Orleans, as if referee Adrian Hill and his crew had stumbled all night on Bourbon Street and shown up moments before kickoff. Were it not for a late Maye completion, a fourth-quarter takeaway and key challenges from Mike Vrabel, officiating would have been the story out of the Superdome.
But the Patriots won, and the perks of winning include getting to shrug at hypotheticals like that and rhetorically ask: who cares?
Because those phantom penalties will ultimately be footnotes in the story of the 2025 Patriots, who have already matched their win total from last year.
It took just six weeks for the Pats to march as far under Vrabel as they did for Jerod Mayo. Granted, the talent difference between those Patriots and Vrabel’s team is vast. But Mayo’s Patriots, and those of Bill Belichick’s final years, lose that game Sunday. They unravel.
They get distracted by the officiating. They slip against the Saints’ persistence. They die a death of one thousand cuts, with quarterback Spencer Rattler and rookie coach Kellen Moore patiently dissecting Vrabel’s defense one checkdown and in-cut at a time. They grumble and mope and resort to finger-pointing.
It’s all happened before.
But Sunday, minutes after their win went final, Vrabel’s Patriots were moving on. Maye didn’t even want to dwell on being 4-2.
“Just go get win No. 5,” he said post-game.
If the Patriots show up in Tennessee next Sunday like they did in New Orleans this weekend, their fifth win is a stone-cold lock. Until then, the storylines paving their road south will be obvious: the Pats searching for their first four-game win streak since they were last a playoff team, and Vrabel returning to exact some measure of revenge on the franchise that fired him. For now, those talking points can wait.
It’s the walk Vrabel walked in Tennessee that deserves examination, because those are the same steps the Patriots are taking now. Vrabel molded the Titans into tough, smart, physical teams. Perhaps most importantly, they punched above their weight.
A week ago, the Patriots did just that by upsetting Buffalo in a game that teased their playoff ceiling. Sunday showcased their floor. As enthralling as beating the Bills may have been, chasing a leader down is the easiest race to run. It’s how you run, how you play, how you focus, with a lead that reveals the competitive spirit.
The Patriots passed that test Sunday.
“Just kept battling,” Vrabel said post-game. “Nothing was perfect today.”
This is now a rising, maturing team with enough mental toughness to put away bad opponents despite bad luck and maddening officiating. Since toughness is a skill, the Pats can grow beyond what they’ve shown the last two weeks in Buffalo and New Orleans.
Now, odds are the Patriots will lose one of their next three — at Tennessee, versus Cleveland and versus Atlanta — before they travel to Tampa Bay for another battle with a projected playoff team. But if they sweep their next three games, that will say more about who they are than whatever unfolds in a one-game sample against the Bucs. It will say they’re ready, ready for more.
In his opening press conference, Vrabel famously declared he wasn’t sure if the Patriots were good enough to capitalize on bad football.
Ten months later, that answer is a resounding yes. The only question now is how much better they might become.
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