Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2012 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read the other Why Your Team Sucks 2012 previews here.


1. OW-AH FANS AHHH BETTAH THAN YOUR-AH FANS! New England sports fans are the worst sports fans on the face of the Earth. They're fucking awful in every way, and I can barely stand the sight of them. People from Boston labor under the mistaken belief that being a relentlessly cynical asshole makes you tough. Endearing, even. They believe their deliberate misery makes them harder and deeper than you. It's all BULLSHIT. A truly tough man keeps his chin up when life gets difficult. When life gets difficult for a Boston fan, he calls WEEI eight times a day to wail like a fucking BITCH. There's nothing tough about these people. France could invade New England tomorrow and seize 80 percent of the land with minimal effort, because Tommy from Quinzee would be too busy demanding that the bartender put more Everlast songs on the jukebox.

And the worst part of it all is that Boston fans have somehow managed to colonize the media industry. EVERYONE at Football Outsiders is a Pats fan (which explains that site's reluctance to give the Giants ANY credit for winning two Super Bowls against them). Everyone at ESPN is a Red Sox fan. And everyone in the fucking comedy writing industry is a Boston fan. It's insane. It's like a goddamn cabal.


And then we have Bill Simmons, who takes his lame "I talk just like all fans do!" excuse and proceeds to beat you over the head with his homerism like it's a fucking tire iron. People here get ornery whenever we take shots at Simmons, but it's not our fault that the man is so grotesquely self-involved and humorless that he can say shit like, "I can't imagine any fan base has experienced more extreme highs and lows over a 10-year span" with a straight face. Hey, you know what? GO TO HELL. Every fan goes through highs and lows, and yours are no more special than anyone else's. If I hear one more goddamn Boston fan say, "This may be the least likable team in Red Sox history!" I'll shit in their coffee. No one gives a fuck where this Red Sox team ranks on your imaginary historical likability scale. You are not the sun around which the rest of the sporting solar system revolves. Why don't you go beat off to Ben Affleck wearing every Boston sports jersey in The Town and quit smothering the rest of the country with your insufferable bullshit? All of you are horrible and diseased.

2. They don't even like the Patriots. I have a dirty little secret, and that is that I spent more time in my life living in New England—13 years—than living anywhere else. I went to prep school in New Hampshire (I know, I know, I'm a dipshit). I went to college in Maine. My parents have lived in northern Connecticut for over two decades. I hung out with a lot of New England sports fans before 2001, and I'm going to tell you something: Before 2001, Boston sports fans HATED the Patriots. It's not that they ignored the Patriots; it's that they absolutely loathed them. The Patriots didn't have the championship tradition of the Celtics, nor did they have the compelling (to Boston people, at least) sob story of the Red Sox, nor the Bawbby fackin' Orr scrappitude of the Bruins. The Patriots were given all the love and support of a Russian foster child.

G/O Media may get a commission LG 75-Inch 8K TV Buy for $2150 from BuyDig Use the promo code ASL250

And now Pats fans are the most insufferable species of human being. They ALWAYS want you to think that they're smarter than you because their coach is smarter than anyone else. Meanwhile, you couldn't get these people to watch a Pats game in September and October if you offered them a thousand bucks and a Kate Upton rimjob. Secretly, they can't wait to go back to hating the Pats and having more free time to dote on their precious, dipshit Red Sox. They're the worst.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew@deadspin.com.


3. The defense is still puke. I could watch this team lose to the Giants in the Super Bowl every year. I never want to stop seeing them fail on a national stage. And there's no reason to think they won't do so again. Pass rushers Andre Carter and Mark Anderson are gone now. The Pats will take three-and-a-half minutes just to get anywhere near the quarterback. The secondary is still horrible, and no amount of creative engineering by Belichick (LOOK! He has Aaron Hernandez playing safety! He's such a rebel!) can mask it. This is a still a team perfectly designed to go 12-4 in the regular season thanks to a soft schedule and a kickass passing offense, and then choke in the playoffs once they're forced to run the ball and Eli Manning hangs three touchdowns on them in the final 70 seconds of regulation. I can't wait.

4. Fucking cheaters. There's a whole book out now about just how greatly the Patriots benefited from stealing defensive signals during games. The spying was so extensive, according to one of author Bryan O'Leary's sources, that Tom Brady might've known the defensive calls ahead of time on over 70 percent of his snaps. That's fucking CHEATING. No wonder the Patriots haven't won a Super Bowl since 2004. No wonder supposed offensive genuises like Charlie Weis and Josh McDaniels turned to sandy diarrhea after striking out on their own. It's all so obvious in retrospect. You cheated, and now you suck because you can't cheat. TEAR DOWN THE BELICHICK STATUE.


5. Hear it from Patriots fans!

John:

When Vince Young, Dan Orlovsky, and Jason Campbell put up 300 yards on your defense, you could play the MEAC and still be fucked. But no worries, we still have a defensive roster with players who have versatility. . . and in New England, versatility has come to mean sucking at two or more things. For instance, Devin McCourty is versatile because he cannot play corner or safety. Tracy White is versatile because he cannot rush the passer and he cannot cover. And, of course, in general our defense is versatile . . . because it cannot do shit.


Rich:

NOBODY WILL EVER TELL BILL BELICHICK THAT HE IS WRONG.

Elliott:

We still have to watch Sergio Brown play defense. He makes pass interference seem like a decent outcome.


Tom:

I hate just about every one of the dichkeads in that stadium on any given Sunday. Commonly referred to as the wine and cheese crowd, these fuckers refuse to get involved in games. On my left sits a guy who spends half of every game telling everyone to sit down, on my right are tickets owned by some assholes who only come to the "best" 2-3 games of the year and sell the rest to what always ends up being Jets fans. Next time you see a Pats game on TV, notice the red seats in the middle section of Gillette Stadium. That's where the people in the luxury boxes have the option of sitting outside. During cold games (read: almost all games) these seats are barren, making Foxboro what I assume is one of, if not the, quietest stadium in football. Patriots fans are also the biggest group of front runners in the league. I've heard the offense booed off the field more times than I can count. Sure, everyone deserves to be booed from time to time but the Pats offense has been pretty ok the last few years. Also, in one of the last games of his career Troy Brown botched a punt attempt and he was booed off the field. Troy Brown being booed at home is beyond my little brains' power of comprehension. They show up late, they leave early. Fuck Patriots fans. Fuck them in their fucking assholes. And this. I would give anything for this banner to be removed. Or burned. Or removed and burned.


Tim:

Can we get a running back that isn't comically named or four-foot-nine inches tall?


Chris:

As a Patriots fan, the absolute worst thing about New England are the rest of the fans. I understand why no one else in the league or country likes them, and why people constantly shit on them. I have never met another fan who isn't a total dickring. If I see another Pats fan at a bar, I prepare for them to completely embarrass themselves sometime in the first quarter and to have the rest of the bar contemplating stabbing them with broken bottles the rest of the afternoon. My dad is the worst of the bunch, declaring them the worst team in the NFL at least three times a game regardless of who they play. I'm fortunate enough to root for a Super Bowl-competitive team ever year, yet I'm still embarrassed to ever admit it in public even though most of my friends are Browns fans.


Tyler:

This video is horrible and embarrassing. Our "response" to the Super Bowl shuffle in 1986.

Vicki:

If your team beats ours, don't expect any credit from our douchebag fans.

Jess:

We are physically incapable of saying anything good about another team or its fans.


Jeremy:

Let's talk about the defense, shall we? -Belichick's version of the 3-4 defense, built around big defensive lineman who 2 gap and don't rush the passer, was mostly effective against 1980s offensive schemes (or if you're the Jets, 2010s offensive schemes) where quarterbacks took their snaps from under center, teams ran the ball 60% of the time, and there were three or fewer pass catchers on the field in almost all formations. This defensive scheme became completely obsolete by 2005, yet it took Belichick 7 years to acknowledge the changing tides and draft a fucking pass rusher. -We passed on Clay Matthews (twice!) in the first round of the '09 draft because he did not fit into our obsolete defensive scheme. -That same offseason, we traded a third and fifth round pick to the Raiders for Derrick Burgess, who was old and terrible and soon out of the league. Belichick got fleeced by Al freaking Davis. This also is a good place to address Belichick's arcane devotion to building a defense of "established veterans" (read: old farts and useless retreads) instead of using his vault of picks to trade up and draft/develop actual talent. That methodology probably cost us two more Super Bowl wins, no thanks to guys like Sean Ellis, Gerard Warren, and Albert Haynesworth. -We cut Merriweather and James Sanders and then lost the SB partly because our remaining safeties couldn't cover anyone. -We still only have one legitimate safety on the roster, who has yet to play all 16 games in a season and is currently injured. To bolster the position in the offseason, we drafted some white dude in the sixth round who only played special teams in college, spent a second round pick on a guy who all experts had tagged with a 5th-7th round grade, and we signed a guy who the Chargers let walk after 4 unremarkable seasons. -Watching Chad Brown and Monty Beisel as our starting middle linebackers in '06 was like watching guards hitting a tackling sled. Also, we took Laurence Maroney over DeAngelo Williams and Maurice Jones-Drew in the '06 draft. I could write another one of these on the illustrious history of Patriots running backs. Remember Marion Butts? I'm pretty sure he averaged, like, 1.5 yards per carry.


Rich:

In their last 2 Super Bowl (appearing) seasons, the Pats led in the 4th quarter a whopping 37 out of 38 games yet did not win a Super Bowl either year.


Andy:

Our fans are worthless piles of human excrement. Most of the so-called Patriots fans in New England are dipshit pink hats who simply transition from their Big Papi jersey to a Tom Brady jersey every September. They don't know shit about the team, they don't know shit about football, and it would amaze me if they could name anyone other than Bill Belichick or Tom Brady as being associated with the Patriots. After the loss to the Giants, roughly half of my coworkers were walking in smiling like nothing happened on Sunday. These very same idiots were decked out in Pats gear all amped up for the game on Friday and they're smiling on Monday? Fucking pink hats. When your team loses the Super Bowl, you cry, become violent, cry some more, and drink yourself into a coma; that's what being a fan truly means. The worst part of it all is that those of us who actually live and die by a Patriots season are lumped in with these assholes. We're called homers, bandwagon fans, pink hats, etc. because the team has been successful for 10+ years. I was born a Patriots fan, raised by a Patriots fan, my children will be forced into becoming Patriots fans, and I will die a Patriots fan. I sincerely hope every one of you pink hat dipshits chokes on your CLAM CHOWDAH because you fucking enrage me. Please, die.


Kevin:

Everybody fucking HATES us. It took me a while to understand this, and it really bums me out. I know it's like a millionaire actor who whines about how HE CAN'T LIVE A NORMAL LIFE, but anytime I read something on this site, or a blog that isn't affiliated with New England, everyone wants us to die. And if I defend my team, I'm a douchebag. "Well, Tom Brady may or may not have had hair plugs; may be a spokesman for Uggs; may have his wife bitch out his teammates for not catching his passes…but he's Tom Brady! So handsome!" And every year at the draft, I have to listen about how smart the Pats are, stockpiling picks. It's maddening to see them go in with 39 picks, and have them trade them all away for FUTURE picks. You know what? Trade up for a sure thing LB or DB. Every year we have a patchwork secondary, stocked with your dad and a Labrador retriever (like Air Bud!). However, you can't bitch about it, because you like the Pats. My girlfriend is from Long Island, and I had to watch the Giants* beat us last year with her and her sister cheering next to me. Fuck the fucking Giants.


Felipe:

We New Englanders treat the last 11 years as if they were the norm. To us, the Patriot Way is some sort of physical law making it inevitable for the Patriots to win every year, and the four decades of absolute DOGSHIT football that preceded 2001 never happened. Naturally, this has turned us into unbearable dipshits, looking down on the rest of the league while we jerk off to Belistrator Breakdowns. Look away from our awful defense. Forget that Bill Belichick seems to be showing the first signs of dementia (if only in his drafting and personnel moves, but I'm sure it will affect the rest of his abilities soon enough) yet has been basically allowed unchecked power within the organization for decades to come. Don't worry that we're one Brady injury away from being irrelevant in the AFC. We're #1! When it all comes crashing down in a couple years nobody's going to feel bad for us during the next decades, as we remember our real natural state: that of eating shit every day.


Lucas:

This year, when the Patriots inevitably lose to some inferior team in the playoffs by the score of 10-7, at least I'll be able to take solace in the fact that they ran up the score to triple digits against some fucking UFL team like the Chiefs or the Seahawks.


Eric:

Wes Welker will again catch a hundred passes because, like usual, nobody will bother to cover him. I've never seen someone look like they were moving so fast yet cover such little ground. The Boston sports media is awful. If Rob Gronkowski were black he would be run out of town regardless of production. The second Brady and Belichick leave or begin to suck ass, "lifelong" Pats fans will stop going to the games and it's blackout city. And why should they go? The stadium is in the middle of fucking nowhere, yet it still takes forever to get there and twice as long to leave because some asshole thought a 2-lane highway was sufficient to handle a football stadiums' worth of vehicles. Robert Kraft is a cheap drunk and needs to buy a new goddamn shirt. We are the new Cowboys fans.

Jesse:

We're in the Yankees territory of being so consistently successful that everyone is just sick of us. The 2001 Patriots were America's Team. We were underdogs, we had grit and a boatload of personality (We came out as a team in the Super Bowl! No one had done that! Had you heard?). Plus, it didn't really hurt to have the name "Patriots" during the most patriotic time in the last 50 years of our nation's history. But that team was supposed to be a momentary blip of euphoric significance, a flash in the patriotic pan. Like Rudy, we had our one moment in the sun, and then we were expected to go right back to doing whatever the fuck Rudy did beforehand. Instead, we evolved into the soulless, robotic juggernaut we are today. And now, there isn't a more universally hated team in the NFL. The Cowboys have turned over that honor to us like a Romo drive in the fourth quarter. As a transplanted Pats fan, it's almost impossible to enjoy your fandom because everyone thinks you're a pompous dick. Bernard Pollard Bernard-Pollarded Brady's knee? GO CHOKE ON UR THREE RINGS. Helmet catch? TUCK RULE. Best offense in NFL history? SPYGATE. You can't even opine on the fantasy potential of Brandon Lloyd without getting berated as a Bill Simmons' cool-aid drinking Bahston chowdahhead homer.


Dave:

We are walking troll bait. Want to get a Pats fan riled up? Post one sentence in a Boston sports site comment section about how Brady isn't a top 10 quarterback all time. Twenty minutes later you'll get a 750 word essay with a fifteen point rebuttal and links to stats and video. And don't even mention Spygate within fifty feet of a Patriots sports bar. We'll all come storming out arguing that it wasn't fair, we didn't really cheat because the rule was that you are allowed to have video cameras in the stands, not on the sideline (which is NOT the rule, just an urban legend) and that the punishment didn't fit the crime.


Andrew:

The Pats have been my favorite team since the mid 90's, but I admit the home crowds are a fucking travesty. They show up late, leave early, and they rarely make noise unless prompted by flashing signs and AC/DC. In other words, it's kinda like watching any professional sport in Florida. I experienced this most recently when the Giants came to Foxboro last season. New York was marching down the field in the final minute of the game. I screamed in agony while flashbacks of doom resurfaced in slow-motion, but those around me stayed silent. It was like living the end of 12 Monkeys.


Josh:

Patriots tickets are the most expensive in the NFL. And you will pay $40 to park in the middle of nowhere. And you will be stuck in your car for hours after the game.


Tom:

The best player in the history of our organization likes to model with dog collars and go cliff diving in fucking South America instead of working out in the offseason, our second best player bar hops and acts like a douchebag college frat boy and our head coach is an ignorant dick that doesn't like to get the best players available on the free agent market. We could have had Mike fucking Wallace or Mario Williams but nooo Jabar Gaffney was the best option. The fans love to start arguments with other teams fans for no fucking reason, just to be assholes and rub the recent(and only) success they've had in other teams faces. And they love to treat the "rivalry" with the Jets as an actual rivalry, when nobody takes that fatass whale clown seriously. Plus, the secondary can't stop a nosebleed and Julian Edleman actually got snaps at defensive back. The fuck man.


Andrew:

Fans actually call the owner "Mr. Kraft." What the fuck is that bullshit? That asshole is a shakedown artist who, in order to get a new stadium built in Foxboro, threatened to move the team to Hartford. Can you believe that shit? Fuck "Mr. Kraft" and the undue respect he gets. Oh, and Gillette has some of the worst crowds in the NFL.

Mike:

We now have two full-time FM radio stations dedicated to propagating the uninformed, self-indulgent whining of the luckiest fan base in professional sports. Flash back to Week 10 of last year. The Pats are 5-3, having dropped two straight to a pair of pretty good playoff-bound teams. Their three losses have been tight games that they lost by a total of 15 points. The toughest game left on their schedule is a Week 17 home game against Buffalo. More than half of the team's starters at DB are on IR. In almost any other NFL city, fans would be happy to be at 5-3 with a cream puff schedule in a shitty division, even if they didn't have one of the best offenses in history, a guaranteed first-ballot hall-of-fame QB, and the best coach of the modern era. In Boston, of course, the talking point of the week is, "Bill Belichick sucks at personnel decisions." These are the same clowns that made, "Should we keep Matt Cassel and trade Tom Brady?" a drive-time radio staple for months in early 2009. Your average Pats fan is just as dumb as your average cheesehead, black-and-silver-decked biker felon, SEC tailgater, or yellow-dishcloth-twirling ignoramus. And that's before they open their mouths. I've met maybe two people of average intelligence or above who have a thick Boston accent.


Dan:

The Tuck Rule call was bullshit. There, I'm a Patriots fan, and I said it.

Wanna be part of the Deadspin NFL previews? It's simple. Just email me and give me ample evidence of why your team sucks. I'll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. Next team up: THE EAGLES.