Patriots: Ranking the 2020 regular season opponents
The New England Patriots are mired in uncertainty as they approach the 2020 regular season — their first in over two decades without Tom Brady.
It’s time for one of my favorite articles of the year: ranking all 16 games on the New England Patriots‘ schedule from “easiest” to “hardest.”
I put the words “easiest” and “hardest” in quotation marks like that only to reinforce the point that no NFL game is easy.
If you tuned into the league’s schedule release show on Thursday night via the NFL Network, you probably heard it over and over again from nearly every coach in the league during their taped interviews.
Some analyst or TV host from NFL Network would ask the coach their thoughts on a particularly juicy matchup or what is commonly perceived to be a tough opponent for that coach’s squad.
And over and over again — ad nauseam, actually — the coaches refused to take the bait.
The recurring refrain was that each and every game on their schedule was equally challenging to consider, and their focus was either solely trained on their Week 1 opponent, their preseason Week 1 opponent, or just internally on their own organization.
This isn’t just an instance of coaches not wanting to give other coaches or teams bulletin-board material — whether positive or negative.
It’s genuine, it’s true … and it’s accurate.
While it’s certainly reasonable to expect some degree of consistency from season to season — it’d be shocking if reigning world champion Kansas City was awful in 2020 — it’s also unfair to look at 32 teams’ records from last season and judge them entirely by those results.
Just look at the Patriots for example.
Last year, this team went 12-4 and won their division. Sure, they made an uncharacteristically early playoff exit, but they were still considered one of the best teams in the league pretty much from wire to wire during 2019/2020.
Not so anymore. Who knows just how good or bad the Patriots will actually be in 2020/2021, but what we do know is that Tom Brady is gone — as are most of the rosy, optimistic feelings about this team’s fortunes without him under center (at least from outside Bill Belichick’s home office).
The following ranking is based off what we know from 2019, combined with new developments in free agency and the 2020 NFL Draft. Beyond that, it’s only a matter of theorizing and making honest predictions.
The 2018 San Francisco 49ers went 4-12 and finished third in their division. The 2019 San Francisco 49ers went 13-4, won their division and their conference, and narrowly lost the Super Bowl.
The takeaway?
Nothing is guaranteed to be true until the games start actually happening. We won’t really know who’s good and who’s bad until Halloween probably, but in the meantime, let’s do our best to analyze all 16 weeks of the Patriots’ season — starting with the “easiest” game and finishing with the “hardest.”