The 2001 New England Patriots season was the 32nd season for the team in the National Football League and 42nd season overall. They finished with an 11–5 record and a division title before advancing to and winning Super Bowl XXXVI.
Coming off a fifth-place finish in head coach Bill Belichick's first season in 2000, the Patriots were not expected to fare much better in 2001. In the second game of the season, nine-year starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe, who received a 10-year contract extension in March 2001, was injured on a hit by New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis, causing backup Tom Brady, a sixth-round draft pick in 2000, to enter the game. The Patriots lost the game to fall to 0–2, but Brady started the final 14 games of the season and compiled an 11–3 record as a starter, helping the Patriots clinch the 2nd seed in the AFC playoffs and a first round bye.
With the second seed in the AFC playoffs, the Patriots faced the Oakland Raiders at home following a first-round bye in the final game at Foxboro Stadium; in a snowstorm, a Patriots drive late in the fourth quarter was kept alive in an application of the now-famous tuck rule that was used in overturning a Brady fumble into an incomplete pass. Shortly after, a 45-yard Adam Vinatieri field goal through the snow, considered one of the most clutch field goals in NFL history, sent the game into overtime, when another Vinatieri field goal won it. After defeating the top-seeded Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship Game, the Patriots faced the heavily favored St. Louis Rams, known as "The Greatest Show on Turf," in Super Bowl XXXVI. Once again, Vinatieri kicked a game-winning field goal; the 48-yard kick sailed through the uprights as time expired, and gave the Patriots their first ever Super Bowl victory in what has been considered by many to be a "cinderella" season.
Read more about 2001 New England Patriots Season: Staff, Opening Training Camp Roster, Schedule, Notable Games, Week 1 Roster, Standings, Final Roster
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“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)
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—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)