Image courtesy of AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
We’ve all heard and seen the stats.
Losing the Super Bowl means you probably suck the next season. It is what it is.
However, if you listen to the fire in Robert Spillane’s voice during his time with the media on Friday – the team reported and went through conditioning tests ahead of the first practice on Saturday – it’s almost unfathomable to think they’ll have a down season.
Emotionally, I’m not sure they can handle it.
“It’s at an all-time high,” Spillane said when asked what the hunger was like prior to this season. “I think having a taste of that game, being there, feeling that, feeling all the feels you get when you don’t get what you want, it makes you hungry. It makes you second-guess everything that you’ve done and makes you look for a little bit more of an edge.
“So, I know myself and everyone in that locker room is looking at themselves, ‘what can I do a little bit better to help this team?”
Marcus Jones and Hunter Henry echoed many of the same sentiments.
“I would say, we were blessed enough to make it that far,” Jones said when asked specifically how hard it is to get back up for a season mentally after such a long run. “We’ve been in those situations where our season ended in January and we wished for times like that. We know that when it comes down to hard work and dedication that we can put in, we can make it to the Super Bowl again.”
“Obviously, you play that late and then you lose a big game like that, something you dream about, obviously it was hard for a long time,” said Henry. “But, once we kind of got back here, get to work on this year and what’s ahead, I think we’re all excited for just this year and not really worried about last year.”
Spillane said the loss affected him so deeply that he didn’t like where it took him.
“It was hard for me. That was hard for me and it was almost like a dark place,” he said.”It was almost like…you don’t want to go there. You have so much emotions about this game, you felt like you let it slip through your hands.
“At the end of the day, you gotta pick up where you left off, you gotta keep going forward. No one feels bad that you made it to the Super Bowl and lost. It’s our job to get back to where we want to get to and we’re going to do that through hard work.”
Many players have probably felt the same way he did following a Super Bowl loss, yet still suffered the same fate as all those other teams that have struggled the year after.
I could just be naive, but it feels like that’s not going to happen to this 2026 Patriots squad.
The work towards avoiding that ugly fate starts Saturday.