Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Brady also benefitted from being in the weakest division in the history of football. Seriously the NFC least could be this bad for five more years and they still would not have the run of dogshit the AFC East has had, minus the Pats. Starting last year, that began to change with the Fins and Bills getting their heads out of their asses. NFC North consistently put two to three teams in the playoffs over most of that same stretch. Butfumble is literally the last team to challenge their dominion of that division. Point being, it was time to make the move because the balance in the AFC East is rapidly changing and a couple of down years rebuilding is better than a last gasp and a decade of Jets level futility.
I know we like to harp on this a lot, and it's not wrong that their division sucked for most of those years, but from the 2001-2019 seasons, the Pats went 134-44 against the rest of the league outside their division. Note that's not including the 2008 season when Brady got hurt week 1...although they still went 11-5 that year and 7-3 outside of the AFC East.
Only twice did they have as bad as a 5-5 record outside of their division over that span. Out of those 18 years, in 11 of them they went 8-2 or better against the rest of the league.
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