New England Patriots Dynasty

The Patriots hired Bill Belichick in 2000, a longtime defensive assistant and former Cleveland Browns head coach, and that spring drafted Tom Brady 199th overall with a compensatory pick, the seventh quarterback taken. When Drew Bledsoe was hurt in 2001, Brady took over an 11–5 team that reached the Super Bowl through a snowstorm, the "Tuck Rule" game against Oakland in the last game ever played at Foxboro Stadium. In New Orleans on February 3, 2002, the first Super Bowl ever played in February after the league's post-9/11 reshuffle, the Rams were fourteen-point favorites with "The Greatest Show on Turf." Belichick, given the choice of introducing his offense or his defense, asked for neither, and Pat Summerall told the Superdome the Patriots had chosen "to be introduced as a team"; the league had refused at first, and every Super Bowl team since has come out the same way. Brady drove the field with no timeouts and Adam Vinatieri's 48-yard kick won it 20–17 as time expired, the biggest Super Bowl upset since Super Bowl III.

Gillette Stadium opened in 2002. Across 2003 and 2004 the team won an NFL-record 21 straight games. Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston, 32–29 over Carolina, was the most-watched Super Bowl to that point at 89.8 million viewers, called the greatest ever by Peter King and remembered by everyone else for Janet Jackson's halftime; Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, 24–21 over Philadelphia, made New England the second franchise after Dallas to win three in four seasons.

2007 was the strangest season: Randy Moss arrived, the offense broke records, the team went 16–0, and the Giants beat it 17–14 in Super Bowl XLII. The same autumn brought Spygate. The team videotaped the Jets' defensive signals from its own sideline on September 9, and the league fined Belichick $500,000, the maximum and the largest ever for a coach, fined the team $250,000, and took its 2008 first-round pick.

The run did not end there. Three more titles came in the 2010s, including a 25-point comeback against Atlanta in Super Bowl LI, for six in all, tying Pittsburgh, across nine Super Bowl trips between 2001 and 2019. Brady left for Tampa Bay in March 2020.