As interesting as the first few weeks of New England’s season have been, though, they have also served as a reminder of the basic set-up of professional football. The Patriots have been so successful for so long in large part because that success has not been founded on groups of specific players. They famously let fan favorites go when they’ve aged just past their primes. They turn replacements into stars and then, down the line, shuttle those stars off for another round of replacements. Even Brady, back in 2001, got his chance when the then-starting-quarterback Drew Bledsoe went down with an injury; Brady won the Super Bowl and Bledsoe never got his job back. The Patriots know that their brutal sport is designed to use players up, so they’ve built a system in which rotating casts of players are mere disposable units for a stable management group—ownership, front-office executives, Belichick. It’s an effective and unabashedly corporate approach fit for a cold game.

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After Thursday’s game, the talk from both locker rooms centered on that Patriot system, the organizational lockstep and allegiance to Belichick that has made them the NFL’s best and most consistent team for almost two decades. Belichick himself praised his players’ obedience: “They played the game exactly the way we asked them to play it ... They tried to do what we wanted them to do, and as a coach you can’t ask for any more than that.” Bill O’Brien, a former New England assistant coach now helming the Texans, seemed to get wistful about the professionalism of his former employer. “Their program has been in place for a long time,” he said. “They have what I think is the best head coach in the history of the league, and they do a great job.”

Newspaper headlines took similar tones. “Jacoby Brissett was good. But the Patriots’ win Thursday is Bill Belichick’s triumph,” said The Washington Post. “Jacoby Brissett, Patriots game plan the big winners,” said The Boston Globe (in a headline since changed). The Belichick-approved mantra of the Patriots has long been “do your job,” and the sports press confirmed that, yes, the jobs had been done. Players stayed the course and kept to their lanes, no brilliance necessary.

If the Patriots are not only the NFL’s most accomplished organization, lately, but also its most representative—that is, if they’ve achieved all they have because they recognize and embody football’s characteristics more fully than anybody else—then nights like Thursday, and the subsequent reaction to them, can make you think about the appeal of the game. The NFL’s detractors tend to focus on its violence, but it is also relentlessly hierarchical. A few people, the coaches and maybe the quarterback, get to strategize, and the rest recite what they’ve drilled over the week. Whereas other sports tend to celebrate the collaborative aspects, football teams hew to the corporate model—go out, do this, come back for further instruction—with their success largely dependent on the thoroughness of the directives. Players tend to meet the corporate end as well, laid off with the minimum allowable severance.