3. They're just really, really, really unlikable

Nobody loves the Pats because it's almost impossible to like the Pats.

Bil Belichick acts like a jerk, treats the press like a bunch of 3-year-olds, dresses like a slob and makes no effort to be likable because he's there to win football games, not care what you think about him. Tom Brady pulled a Brad Pitt on his pregnant actress girlfriend and upgraded to a supermodel. He tries to act too cool for the room until you see him in magazines holding goats, promoting Uggs and paying somebody to give him a personality on a Facebook page. Brady desperately cares what you think about him, even more so after he was fingered as a cheat.

Speaking of that, the Pats were the subjects of Spygate, Defeflategate and rumors of malfeasance so underhanded you open the team media guide expecting to see G. Gordon Liddy listed somewhere.

New England's first playoff game of the Belichick era was won because of a since-deleted technicality in the NFL rulebook. The team won its first two Super Bowls on last-second field goals, took its third when Donovan McNabb ran a final drive with the urgency of a hungover Sunday afternoon stroll and won the fourth after Russell Wilson gift-wrapped a goal-line interception. All told, their four rings are by a combined 13 points, a margin of victory that has been exceeded in half of all the other Super Bowls.

That led to the sense, at least early on, that the team was more lucky than good. You got the feeling that the football karma would eventually even out and the Pats would come back to earth. And it kind of did -- the team didn't win a Super Bowl for a decade and was caught up twice in major scandals with the feeling that just as many weren't discovered. But as that was happening, the Patriots were making it clear they weren't some sort of historical fluke. They were among the best teams ever and, probably when it's all said and done, the greatest. Thus, they became hatable for an entirely different reason.