NFL Teams Betting - New England Patriots - AFC East

When you win three of the past four Super Bowls how can you be anything but the favorite to win the division and return to the playoffs? New England has some holes but until someone beats Brady in the playoffs, his team has to be favored. The Patriots head into NFL Season much like they did four years ago, with a chip on their shoulder from losing a Super Bowl to the New York Giants on an improbable late-game comeback.

It was as if lightning struck twice in the same spot on the same day four years apart. That’s how similar the Giants’ surprise 2011 championship season was to their incredible 2007 run.

And when it happened again, when they made it two Super Bowl championships in five seasons, the Giants should’ve been branded an NFL powerhouse and a franchise on the verge of becoming a dynasty. Instead, they have the same questions they left open the last time they were defending champions:

Are they on the verge of greatness? Or was the whole thing just a fluke?

That may be an insulting question to the defending champs, but it’s one they’re going to have to answer this season. Are they the team that was struggling at 7–7 just before Christmas, or the team that went on a 6–0 roll for the ages through Green Bay, San Francisco and then the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI?

They return most of the starters from the team that won it all. They just need to prove that they were more than an average team that got hot at exactly the right time.