In some very obvious ways, the New England Patriots have been here before. Super Bowl XLVI is the team’s seventh Super Bowl in franchise history, and fifth since they upset the Rams’ Greatest Show on Turf in 2002. Prior to Y2K, the Pats’ Super Bowl appearances were mostly notable for the teams that steamrolled them—Mike Ditka’s 1985 Bears and Brett Favre’s 1996 Packers. But that win against the Rams set in motion one of, if not the, greatest decades ever by a professional football team, with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick leading the team to three Super Bowl wins in four years and an 18-0 season in 2007 before losing the big game to … the New York Giants.
Now that we’re caught up on ancient history, it’s time to realize that, aside from Belichick and Brady, this team has changed with the new decade as it prepares for its Super Bowl XLVI rematch with the G-Men. First off, Brady has, in many ways, been eclipsed as the team’s most visible player. That honor might now go to Rob Gronkowski, the enormous, improbably fast tight end in only his second year out of Arizona. Gronkowski went in the second round of the 2010 draft to the Pats, falling out of the first thanks to injury, and his rookie outing was impressive enough: 42 receptions and 10 touchdowns put him in the upper echelon of receiving tight ends from the very start.
But what would have stood as a career year for the vast majority of tight ends in the league—his 10 touchdowns put him only three off the record for most at the position—looks like child’s play compared to what he did in 2011. With 90 receptions, 17 touchdowns and 1,327 receiving yards, he shattered every relevant receiving record. Only two players have ever caught more touchdowns than him in a single regular and postseason combined: Jerry Rice and Randy Moss. It doesn’t even sound ridiculous to start looking forward to Gronkowski’s potentially all-time-great career. He’s also fun—his garbled “Yo soy fiesta” response following the win against Baltimore has become a sort of rallying cry for the team—and seems to have changed the tenor of a franchise that used to send off a melancholy vibe, even at its most dominant. (For evidence of this new mood, see: Belichick smiling.)
Oh, and his partner in crime at tight end isn’t too shabby, either. Aaron Hernandez had 79 catches for 910 yards and seven touchdowns this year as well. No team in history ever used a pair of tight ends like that Pats do. According to Mike Reiss of ESPN, “No tight end duo has ever even come within 40 catches of Gronkowski and Hernandez” and “the combined 2,237 receiving yards for Gronkowski and Hernandez are over 300 more than any team has had at tight end in a season. The old record belonged to those 1984 Chargers, who had four tight ends combine for 1,927 yards.” They even make Brady better: “When both Gronkowski and Hernandez are on the field, Brady had 31 touchdowns and four interceptions. Otherwise, he threw eight touchdowns and eight interceptions.”
Value is the only commonality in an increasingly complex, challenging and interdependent world.