After watching the Patriots go through more than two decades of dominance, entering each and every season with a legitimate chance to win the Super Bowl, it's hard to imagine where the franchise was before all that success. Back in the early 1990s, New England was not just a bad team but was considered among the worst organizations in all of professional sports.
During the first 33 years of existence, the Patriots qualified for the postseason just six times. They won four playoff games, and three of those came during the magical run to Super XX in 1985, a trip that ended with an embarrassing 46-10 defeat.
Instead of playing in front of sellout crowds and enjoying welcoming atmospheres on the road, the Patriots were a laughingstock. By the time the 1990s rolled around, the team had hit rock bottom. The first three years of the decade featured a grand total of eight wins against a staggering 39 losses. Rod Rust fashioned the worst campaign in team history in 1990, going 1-15 in his only season as head coach.
Back then if a friend asked if you wanted to join him at a Patriots game, the response was usually filled with laughter. Nobody even watched the team let alone travelled to Foxborough to do so live. Crowds routinely dipped below 40,000, and often under 30,000. One game, a December 1992 loss to the lowly Colts, saw 19,429 hearty souls make the trek to Sullivan Stadium.
Trophy Town was more like "atrophy town" until a couple of months later when Bill Parcells came in and kicked a little 'a.' That's when the Patriots hired Parcells as the team's 12th head coach in January of 1993. Instantly, the franchise that had been rudderless for so many years finally had a legitimate captain to steer the ship – one with two Lombardi Trophies from his days coaching the Giants.
A couple of months later Parcells' first big decision in charge brought Drew Bledsoe to New England as the No. 1 overall pick. After operating with no real assets, the Patriots suddenly had two – and more importantly – legitimacy.
That was the turning point for me, having been out of college for a few years and wanting so badly to embrace the football team, Parcells and Bledsoe served as the impetus to becoming a season-ticket holder and clinging to the hope that someday soon we'd have a team worth backing.
It didn't take long for that to come to fruition. Despite inheriting the worst roster in the league, Parcells quickly overhauled the Patriots into a scrappy team capable of hanging with anybody. The 1993 club managed just a 5-11 record, but eight of those defeats were by four points or less, two coming in overtime. With the rookie Bledsoe learning on the fly, Parcells molded the team into his image and by the time December rolled around the wins started to come.
The Patriots rattled off four straight victories to close the season, the last coming when Bledsoe hit Michael Timpson for a touchdown in overtime to knock the Dolphins out of the playoffs. Instead of 19,000 watching a stretch drive game a year earlier, almost 54,000 were on hand to see Timpson's catch. Clearly the momentum for something bigger was underway.
Parcells was just getting started, and when Robert Kraft stepped in to buy the team and ensured the franchise would remain in New England, things really took off. Now season ticket sales skyrocketed, and sellout crowds became the norm. Building off that momentum, the Patriots went 10-6 in 1994, finishing on a seven-game winning streak, and earned a wild card spot. Two years later, the 1996 team made it to the Super Bowl after posting the first two home postseason wins in club history.
With Parcells, Bledsoe and Kraft, the Patriots finally had stability, and it was that triumvirate that set the foundation for the other-worldly success that Bill Belichick would enjoy five years later.
Parcells remains a polarizing figure in New England due to his short four-year tenure and the controversial way he left. That is evident by the often-contentious discussions the Hall of Fame committee has each year when discussing his candidacy, as well as the fans' voice being heard loud and clear by his lack of induction despite being on the ballot five times as a finalist.
Kraft recognized Parcells' uphill battle against so many deserving players, knowing the coach would be hard-pressed to ever make it against such long odds. So, he took matters into his own hands and inducted Parcells as a contributor to the Patriots Hall of Fame.
It's easy to think of the Patriots as a model franchise given the success of the last 20-plus years, but it wasn't like that before Parcells arrived. He helped close the door on decades of dysfunction and ushered in the championship era in Foxborough, and Kraft made sure we all remembered.
DISCLAIMER: The views and thoughts expressed in this article are those of the writer and don't necessarily reflect those of the organization. Read Full Disclaimer
