The 1990 New England Patriots season was the team's 31st, and 21st in the National Football League. It was the first and only season for head coach Rod Rust.
The Patriots finished the season with a record of 1-15, the worst record in franchise history. They finished last in the AFC East division and dead last in the NFL. Notably, they lost a nationally-televised game to the Washington Redskins in which they were down 9–0 before the Redskins even ran an offensive play. The Redskins' two first-quarter scores came on a Kurt Gouveia fumble return for a touchdown, and the Patriots snapping the ball out of the end zone for a safety. The announced crowd for the game, played in a driving rain, was 22,286.
The Patriots’ final game of the season vs. the eventual Super Bowl champion New York Giants drew a sellout crowd to Foxboro, but over 40,000 fans were rooting for the visitors, as tickets to Giants home games are nearly impossible to come by for non-season ticket holders.
The Patriots’ negative-265 point-differential (181 points scored, 446 points surrendered) was the worst total of the 1990s. It is notable that like the previous season’s Dallas Cowboys, the Patriots played only three teams with non-winning records - divisional rivals the Colts and Jets plus one game against the Phoenix Cardinals - all season.
The 1990 Patriots and 1981 Baltimore Colts are the only NFL teams since 1940 to have eleven losses during which they never led in one season.
Read more about 1990 New England Patriots Season: Lisa Olson Controversy, Staff
Famous quotes containing the words england, patriots and/or season:
“How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)