Placing the current Patriots with those three teams/franchises is an incredible achievement. It won't truly be appreciated in full by either Boston area or national fans and media for many years, after this run has long ended.
In my opinion - admittedly not completely objective - the success of the Patriots in the 2000s and 2010s is actually a more impressive achievement than that of those three great teams.
The reason I say that is because the Patriots are the only one to accomplish so much long term success while playing in an era of the double edged sword of free agency and the salary cap. Also factor in a sport with the shortest average career, with replenishment of quality players hampered by the annual draft based on inverse order of the previous season's record.
In addition injuries - which are more plentiful in both severity as well as quantity in football - play a larger role in the outcome of NFL games than in other sports.
Consider all those components. A team is absolutely not supposed to be able to have sustained success in today's National Football League. With four-team divisions, teams and owners were supposed to never have long droughts of missing the playoffs - with the caveat that their team would also only have a few years of success when they were king of the hill.
Unless we see dramatic rule changes, I don't believe we will ever see this kind of sustained success in either the NFL or even in any of the four major US team sports ever again.
1. NFL is, and has been really since the invention of the forward pass, a quarterback-driven league.
2. Canadiens automatically had the top, prime draft pick of the French-Canadians every year, no matter how well they did the previous year. Rigged.
3. Yankees had the money, and spent it. Utilized their resources to find the best prospects and sign them (Mantle, DiMaggio, etc.) Through Steinbrenner, they bought their success.
4. The Celtics remain, and IMO will always remain the gold standard. Walter Brown was an exceptional, humble person who loved his hometown Boston and just thought we ought to have a pro basketball team. He new nothing about the sport. He took sportswriters' advice and hired Red Auerbach. The team was
always on a shoestring budget, being gypped in renting the Garden even though he inherited it from his dad, had a Hall of Fame hockey career (including coaching the USA to its first gold medal in the Ice Hockey World Championships in 1933 in Prague) and bailing out the Bruins in 1951. Meanwhile, the Knicks and Lakers had and spent tons of money, and in that smaller league faced Philly and LA teams loaded with superstars. The Celts' later success in the 70's and 80's was
despite ownership.
5. The Pats' run today is not comparable to anybody. It dwarfs the Braves' long run of success in baseball. Kraft deserves credit for his determination to buy the team, but if you overcome his insistence that the Patriots were essentially nonexistent prior to his purchase, the run of the franchise since its inception in 1959 is most impressive.
Let's face it: What's the difference between Kraft and Billy Sullivan?
Off the field:
- Pete Rozelle did not dispatch Paul Tagliabue to Boston in 1970 to get the Massachusetts legislature to do a complete 180 and support the construction of a new professional football stadium for the Patriots.
On the field:
- Troy Brown was not paralyzed for life by a cheap shot in Tampa on November 16, 1997.
- Bill Belichick did not choose to bench Tom Brady and make the recovered Drew Bledsoe the starter on November 19th, 2001.
- Ben Dreith did not officiate the last game at old Foxboro Stadium on January 19, 2002.
