FOXBORO, Mass. As the last seconds ticked off the clock in Cleveland to seal a 38-15 win by the New England Patriots over the Cleveland Browns, Frank Zuroshka set up a pup tent bearing his favorite team’s logo outside Gillette Stadium here. “I knew they could do it,” Zuroshka said to his friend Mike Bilewski as the two men high-fived each other after watching the game on their phones. “State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona–here we come!” Bilewski shouted to an empty parking lot, referring to the site of Super Bowl LVII.
Parking lot, Gillette Stadium
The two men say they want to be first in line when Super Bowl tickets go on sale, but when this reporter asks whether their plans are premature given that the win merely evens the Patriots’ record at 3-3, they grow belligerent. “Why are you so negative?” Zuroshka asks with an undercurrent of menace in his voice. “This is why people hate the media,” Bilewski adds, “even more than lawyers.”
A sense of optimism, or even entitlement, is the characteristic mindset of a New England Patriots fan after the team won six Lombardi trophies between 2001 and 2018. “That’s one every three years,” says Myron Floskill, an amateur sports statistician who served as a Patriots scout prior to the merger of the American Football League with the NFL. “Some of these guys don’t have sex with their wives that often.”
Cargo cult.
Psychologists say Patriots fans’ rosy view of the team’s prospects is a “defense mechanism,” and not the kind that involves linebackers and safeties. “It borders on what anthropologists call a ‘cargo cult,’” says Dr. Floyd Batch, referring to natives who tried to bring back material wealth they were introduced to when American servicemen landed on their isolated Pacific Islands. “Cargo cults built primitive models of airplanes and landing strips, Patriots fans carve soap images of Adam Vinateri,” the place-kicker whose field goal provided the winning margin in 2001 to give the team its first Super Bowl win over the St. Louis Rams.
But any suggestion that fans’ belief in the Patriots invincibility is mere superstition is rejected by hard-core supporters of the team such as Zuroshka and Bilewski, who upend this reporter to get a better look at his boxer shorts. “Just checking,” Zuroshka says as he places me right side up again. “I thought for a minute you were maybe a closet New York Jets fan.”
Hilarious. And all too plausible.