The Patriots were happy Sunday night into early Monday morning. Smiles were everywhere. They had answered more questions, especially quarterback Drake Maye, with the first fourth-quarter come-from-behind victory of his NFL career.
This isn’t close to being the same group that stumbled and bumbled and embarrassed themselves repeatedly over the two previous seasons, recording back-to-back 4-13 seasons. Mike Vrabel was hired, brought a new coaching staff with him, and turned over more than 50% of the roster. This is year one of the rebuild - and yes, there’s still plenty of work to be done. And yet, the Patriots have won 11 of their last 12 games and are headed back to the playoffs for the first time since 2021-22.
“I think it’s top down,” Maye said of this turnaround. “It’s coach Vrabel coming in here, it’s the coaching staff he hired, it’s the guys buying in and believing in what we do. That’s the biggest thing. Believing in what the coach is saying and believing in our identity and carrying it with us.”
“I think everything we’ve done on the field just embodies everything we believe in the building, for sure,” K’Lavon Chaisson said.
As part of the identity that’s been built, the Pats allowed themselves to enjoy the win in Baltimore. However, no one allowed themselves to be satisfied, at least not publicly.
“More work to do,” said Jaylinn Hawkins, repeating that sentence again. “More stuff to input. More work to do. Time to get even better. ... We still got two more games left. Still in that one-week-at-a-time pace, one day at a time. Win the day.”
We’re not talking about playoff wins or Super Bowls (not yet). We’re talking about the goal Vrabel set for this team when he first met with all of them in the spring.
“We’re going to try to win the division,” Vrabel said.
"We want to win the division, and that's still what we're fighting for,’ Maye said in the postgame, seconding his coach. “It's awesome to clinch the playoffs, but we want to win the division."
Improbable as it may have seemed then, it can become a reality with a win over the Jets this weekend (and a Bills loss). They will have to pack their bags and identity again, as that opportunity will present itself at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Of course, the Pats have been more successful on the road than at home this season, winning all seven games they’ve played away from Gillette Stadium. That’s just another sign of how fast and how far they’ve come, “packing their identity” as Vrabel likes to say, and bringing the fight to whoever, whenever.
“There’s a lot of underdogs in there,” Hunter Henry said of the locker room. “There are a lot of guys who play with a chip on their shoulder on this team. I don’t know. We kind of feed off everybody against it. It’s a lot of fun to come in and quiet a crowd.”
“It’s all about the will and the want to,” Chaisson added.
That was being tested early in the fourth quarter. The Pats were down 24-13 and were one failed drive, either offensively or defensively, from suffering a second straight defeat and giving the doubters all the fuel they needed to declare this team a fraud. After all, this has been the second-easiest scheduled in NFL history since 1999.
But they responded, be it young guys like Maye playing nearly flawless football down the stretch, and rookie wideout Kyle Williams making the catch of his young career. It was also veterans like Rhamondre Stevenson, who scored the game-winning touchdown; Stefon Diggs, who said PrimeTime is his time; and Morgan Moses, who looked to be done for the game with an injury but found a way to return and go the distance in the second half. That earned him a long embrace from Vrabel as he made his way back to the locker room following the win.
“It was confident even when shit wasn’t looking good,” Diggs said of the game’s ebbs and flows. “It’s a 4-quarter game. That’s a great football team. Well-coached football team. But I like us. I don’t care who we play against. I feel like we grind hard, we got a great identity we built over the course of time, we’ve got a great head coach, we’re all playing this game, and we’re meshing at the right time.”
There will be a number of things we’ll pick through in the coming days and weeks, but for the moment, this latest win is one to be savored. This team - this staff - has restored pride in an organization that was so far down by the end of the last season they needed directions to find their way back up. Now? There’s a belief that anything is possible.
“You never take that for granted,” Chaisson said. “This franchise, this organization, definitely deserves it. We worked our ass to get to this point. It’s a pretty dope opportunity...”